


severance

by skeletonprowler



Series: severance [2]
Category: Archive 81 (Podcast)
Genre: Body Horror, Character Study, Gen, Seasons 1 and 2
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-28
Updated: 2021-02-21
Packaged: 2021-03-06 08:08:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 22,686
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25580095
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/skeletonprowler/pseuds/skeletonprowler
Summary: and dan keeps listening and dan keeps losingorthe segmentation started long before the operating table.
Series: severance [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1851952
Comments: 5
Kudos: 16





	1. Chapter 1

“Hey.”

“Hey, how’s it going?”

Tanya’s relieved voice filters through the concrete. Only three days into the job, but it feels weird to hear something in real-time. Something that is happening now, instead of 20 years ago.

His mind is already wandering.

It feels like the archives are intruding on the conversation long before Davenport interrupts.

* * *

The days go by quickly. The building is so removed from civilization, from everything, that it feels like it is removed from time as well. The walls don’t change and the collection of cans in the pantry does not diminish. The time is marked – or, more accurately, stained – by the opening of cans and the hiss of the Otari. The taste of peaches is permanent, and the sounds of the magnetic tape do not cease. At times Dan thinks he is running on the tapes more than the canned fruit.

Running on, or with, the tapes.

He’s been getting weird ideas. Being all alone in a complex is messing with his head. It’s like the building is growing heavier on top of him and the more the pressure increases, the harder it is to leave. The harder it is to collect the strength to step away from the Otari and go outside.

Two weeks have passed and Dan hasn’t strayed from the path to the tape library.

* * *

Dan has been getting angry. His nerves pop beneath the pressure of the building like gravel beneath car tyres. He gets angry when the tapes don’t give him the information he wants. He gets angry when the tape stutters, when it doesn’t play, when the recurring weird distortions make it unintelligible. He gets angry, and then he gets it to work. He finds it is useful to be angry. It lets him know that there is more to be done.

Which must be why there is irritation sizzling beneath his skin as he juggles his phone and the tape recorder and prepares to give Tanya a glimpse into his work.

He starts the tour in the library. It looks different. There are twice as many tapes as usual. Dan frowns and shakes his head. The tapes swim and multiply, like he’s looking at his surroundings from two sets of eyes.

He ignores the doubling as best he can and continues to record.

The tour is short as it isn’t a big building; it feels more imposing than it actually is. Or maybe he’s confusing it with Visser. He’s practically living in the apartment complex anyway. His vision flickers. He rambles.

“I spend a lot of time reading, working on personal projects, you know, usual stuff. Haven’t been able to take any hikes yet, they’ve got me really busy, and I want to archive my section as soon as possible. I guess I’ve got tunnel vision, or tunnel hearing, more accurately-”

Something small and furry darts across the floor of the bedroom. It squeaks. Loudly.

Shit. The tour had been going so well, too. He could have even convinced himself that he was a functioning adult. He groans.

“Seriously? Okay, Tanya, I will go and deal with this, if I’ve sent this video it means I’ve survived my fight with this stupid rat.”

He tosses the phone on the bed and cautiously peers under it. Nothing launches itself at his face. As he straightens and heads for the pantry, he notices that the world is no longer in two.

The rat turns out to be friendly and talkative. And cute. Dan spends the rest of the week talking it through his theories on the cult and trying to teach it tricks.

The video doesn’t get sent.

So when Tanya calls to ask after it, her voice intruding on the archives and filling the space around him with foreign information that’s not relevant and not important and Dan would rather hear nothing at all than hear a story that isn’t his –

His gravel nerves roll and pop and shoot out beneath the pressure of her voice, and his hand shoots out and hits the ‘7’ key.

“Message deleted,” the robot voice informs him, and he lightens like a weight has been cleaved away. Two people were always hard to manage, and now he is left as one. The one who doesn’t need others. The one who won’t let anything stop him from hearing the story. And he laughs and savours the detachment, the deletion, and goes to listen to more tapes.

* * *

Well, he won’t admit it, but Ratty makes for good company. Dan hasn’t been able to teach it any tricks, but it’s an attentive listener, and Dan takes advantage of that. He talks to it instead of Tanya, instead of his parents, instead of Mark. Ratty’s squeaks break up the narrative on the tapes, reminding him to eat and rest.

And when the power goes out and Dan can swear he hears the song, just around the corner…

Ratty squeaks and darts beneath his feet.

“Shit! Ratty!” Dan curses and stumbles, trying to avoid flattening his roommate. Ratty darts back to a safe distance and scratches its ear, content in its narrow escape.

Dan looks around. He is all the way down in Archive 74.

What was he doing again?

He looks down at the rat and decides he might as well take a break if his feet are wandering as well as his mind.

“Come on. I wanna try making peach cobbler, and I bet you wanna try some.”

The next time the power cuts out, Dan only makes it to Archive 83 before Ratty interrupts the pull. And it’s probably easier, too, because Mark is at the back of his mind, probably clacking away at his computer keys and blackmailing government officials to get information on Melody.

“Ratty! Sorry, I think I got lost in my own head for a second. Did you like that peach cobbler I left out last night?”

The rat lifts its nose towards him at the mention of cobbler. Dan laughs.

“Of course you did. Come on, you wanna watch a movie?”

The phone buzzes in his pocket. Mark’s voice is on the other end, and the surge of happiness hits Dan like a wave. It’s completely disproportionate, like a dam breaking, the water flooding through the dried-up creek bed. As they chat Dan wonders why he doesn’t call more often. But Mark gives him Melody’s phone number, and Dan writes it down and he feels himself distance with each stroke on the paper like the slashes are prison bars. Like the narrative is pulling him under again.

He’s already thinking of the questions he’ll ask Melody when Mark’s voice grows concerned.

“Dan? Can you tell me what’s going on? I mean, why you’re interested in all this?”

His friend’s voice derails his train of thought and it falls away into darkness.

“I just am, alright?” Dan snaps, angry that Mark interrupted his thoughts, angry that he is still wasting time on this call, angry that he isn’t advancing the story, learning –

“Okay, dude,” Mark says reproachfully, and Dan is dragged back to his friend. He apologizes immediately, feeling guilty, but something has restored the dam, the dan –

He ends the call quickly after that. A last trickle of affection squeezes through the concrete and Dan feels guilty one last time, before the outside world is wiped from his mind again.

A day passes before he gets his thoughts in order. His hands are shaking when Melody’s phone is answered on the fourth ring.

“Hello, Dan.” Davenport’s voice sounds gigantic in the silent space. All-powerful.

Dan’s bewilderment quickly hardens to rage under the man’s drawl, and the situation crystalizes in his gaze: the story’s corpse stashed haphazardly away in this lonely building and Dan trapped with it, penned in on all sides by Davenport.

He throws his extra shirt into his suitcase.

“I’m done. I quit,” Dan spits into the phone, gathering his belongings and throwing them into the suitcase. “You can’t force me to stay. This place, it’s not normal. The lights keep flickering and I keep hearing… there are cults, and weird security guards, and teleportation, and I think some sort of evil museum-“

“Are you done?” Davenport sounds like he’s talking to a toddler.

Anger spikes in Dan’s chest. It compounds as he zips up his bag.

“Dan, I’d like you to take a moment and think about what you feel right now. Really think about it.”

Dan laughs, a little bit uneasily. All he feels now is anger, but as he takes the first step away from his living space, it changes direction to point at him - through him. A compass pointing behind him.

“Well I’m pretty angry right now, Mr. Davenport!”

Davenport sounds as smug as ever. “Well, beneath all that, do you feel a slight tautness, a little bit of tugging? There’s a part of you, and it’s not a small part, that’s grown accustomed to this place.”

Dan is at the archives’ entrance, and he finds he cannot even picture what the doors open out onto.

“Nope. I’m opening this door and you can’t stop me.”

Dan is split in two. Dan wants to go home, to see his friends again, to leave behind this weird fuckery. Dan wants, no, _needs_ to see this through. Needs to listen to the story.

The door has swung open and he hasn’t noticed.

“This is your home!”

Silence. Has he stepped out into the sunshine? Is he still behind the door? Dan can’t tell.

Dan is split in two. Angry and bewildered. Scenting freedom. And Davenport keeps talking.

“You feel it, don’t you? A homesickness when you even begin to think about your life outside. Like strings are tying you to this building. If you don’t feel this, if you have no idea what I’m talking about, then walk through that door. Nothing’s stopping you. Just walk out. Away from the truth in this building.”

A chant in his head. Just walk out. And he sees himself in the sun, in the bright midday light. And he’s still standing in the shadows.

“But if you feel the way I think you do, then close the door. And we’ll try and figure this whole thing out.”

“Just…” Dan sounds plaintive to his own ears. Weakened. “Just tell me what’s going on. You know what’s in these tapes, don’t you? Just tell me you know.” The dark, the murk and the unknown waits at his back. It waits smugly.

“We acknowledge that there are… certain... documents... in the archive… that can’t currently be explained by our modern understanding of science…” Davenport spouts his usual corporate bullshit and Dan stands at the threshold. Dan stands between two choices.

“So are we on the same page, Dan? I think it’s really important that we’re of one mind on this.”

Dan musters up every ounce of bite he has to say, “Sounds really great, Mr. Davenport.”

“You take care of yourself. Buh-bye.”

The call ends. Dan snaps back to the archives like a rubber band. The Dan in the sun is forced back into his body and Dan screams. In frustration, like a fox in a trap, because being angry is the only thing he does now. He screams and screams and screams.

And he can only think that he wanted answers. He’s angry because he didn’t get to hear a story. He didn’t get to Melody and it is evident he won’t get anything out of Davenport.

The possibilities have collapsed into his body and he is left in the shadow of the building.

He trudges back to listen to the linear story he was presented with.

At this point, it feels more like he was presented to the story.

* * *

“No song.”

Melody’s voice skips and stretches over the tape as Dan skips through time, time that is starting to sound and feel as one-dimensional and unstoppable as the black tape under his hands.

“June 16th. No song.”

His voices matches Melody’s.

“How long has it been, Ratty? How long has it been?”

Time marches forward, the inexorable unspooling continues. Something scratches at his arms. His own nails dig into his skin. They feel small and sharp. The rat’s eyes are bright with reproach.

“You’re right. I know I should call Tanya. I know, I know, I know.”

Dan hesitates, looking uneasily at the small animal. Rats are social creatures, right? Then it makes sense that it is driving him towards his friends, his family… right?

Dan doesn’t think too hard on it. It’s something he’s been doing a lot. Instead, he doesn’t give himself time to back out and hits dial.

Tanya picks up immediately. Accommodating and considerate.

And Dan has to pause for a second before replying. He isn’t hit with that surge of gladness he had been hit when Mark had called. He is separated from Tanya, he is thinking about how this has nothing to do with him, he is thinking about how Tanya and renovation and the outdoors aren’t his life anymore.

He snaps at her. “Tanya, why are you worried? You knew I was going to eventually get back to you, I’m not going to just leave without explanation. Come on, remember that one time I almost said I love you? That was something, right?”

Silence on the line. Like it’s been muted. Like it’s been cut.

“Oh my god. Dan, who are you?”

Silence in his head. Like it’s been muted. Like it’s been cut.

He stares at the hand not holding the phone. The fingertips are red, but it’s steady. It’s whole, no doubling of the vision. He’s in his body and he shouldn’t have called. The Dan that wanted to call his girlfriend is not here, either no longer or never was.

Tanya’s voice filters through the phone again. “Maybe you need a break? What’s your boss’ name, I’ll call him up for you –“

“No no no no no,” Dan says, too loudly and too upset at the thought of a break. She just doesn’t understand, he thinks desperately.

“You need to understand the gravity of what I’m doing here,” he says desperately.

He plays her a tape. And when she doesn’t understand that, he plays her another one. And when she doesn’t understand, she hangs up, and Dan cuts himself some slack and allows himself a scream of rage.

And even his scream is cut short. A new ringtone plays, one Dan definitely didn’t download, and Davenport’s voice is on the other end, reprimanding him for playing a tape for a civilian. Even his boss doesn’t want him to talk to his friends.

So when Davenport finally gets his fill of patronizing him and hangs up, Dan punches the shelf next to him. And yells. And punches the shelf. And is stopped.

His anger is not interrupted, exactly. His anger isn’t anything of itself, isn’t a wall or a problem. It isn’t a problem. It’s not. It’s just something to do. It’s just something to do when he wastes time on people and politics when he should be archiving. His anger isn’t interrupted, exactly. It just… peels away at the first notes of the song. He knows what it means. He follows it to the next action.

The song leads him to the false back of a shelf, and he tears into it like flesh. He drags the tape out like a heart and it beats against his palm. It’s the blood rushing through this narrative, moving and doing and Dan is scared of it.

Dan’s skin pulses in time with it, and his fingers press play.

On the tape, Davenport needles and mispronounces words at Vos until he gets what he wants. Sounds familiar, Dan thinks. The tape dissolves, his words reverberating in Dan’s ears: “At a certain point, the archives themselves don’t even matter. We pick people who will see a project through. Who need to finish the story.”

Once again Dan sees himself in the building, hands empty and loose by his sides, powerless. Driven forward by himself or by powers beyond him –

The rat beside his foot squeaks loudly, and Dan barks, “Quiet!” his stream of thought severed. When he calls Mark for help he skips the pleasantries. He knows what he is now, and he is someone who will finish the story. Mark tries one more time for a human response.

“Dan, how are you doing? If you’d like me to, get some friends together and come visit, I could do that. If you’d like.”

Dan doesn’t even waste a reaction on it. “No, I’m looking forward to this job ending, but I need to complete this.”

A machine response. He ends the call and puts in the next tape.

* * *

It is almost finished. One last tape.

Dan has a few things to wrap up.

He calls Tanya first. She still picks up, bless her, and thinks he’s breaking up with her.

“I think I’m close to the end, Tanya.” His voice is calm.

He feels… empty.

“Wait, do you think you’re breaking up with me? We haven’t been dating for weeks, you don’t get to act like that and still be in a relationship!”

He chuckles a bit at that, at where her head is at. They’re having two separate conversations. He isn’t even on the same plane as her anymore.

“No, no, I’m almost done with the story. Almost finished. I can feel it. After this I might go off the grid for a bit. Finally write that book. I’ll send you a copy once I’m done.”

There’s an awkward pause that Dan doesn’t feel. He wonders where Ratty is. A nagging absence of information isn't letting him finish the call.

“Tanya, why did you date me? It’s – it’s important,” he steamrolls over her bewilderment.

Tanya, always accommodating, humours him one last time. “I guess I liked how dedicated you are. How you can care deeply about something without worrying what other people think. You’re kind, to the people that matter to you. I felt safe when I was next to you, you knew when to be silent.”

There’s another pause as Dan tries on the silence. It doesn’t quite fit, like an outgrown shirt, cutting into his skin where it’s too tight. Dan no longer has any use for silence. Dan is forward and forward and go to reach new heights, new information. Silence doesn’t benefit him.

“Thank you. I remember the person you’re talking about. He was a good guy.” Something in Dan shifts restlessly, painfully. “Goodbye, Tanya.”

He hangs up. It is almost finished.

The lights shut off.

Visser sings. This time, Dan goes willingly.

“Well alright. Almost there,” he says to no one, as if to say hey, what can you do, as if to remind himself he holds a physical space in the world, as if to pretend he was just barely convinced by the song to walk the steps he is currently taking. When he reaches the shelf, he is smirking, like he has said some witty inside joke.

The shelf unfolds before him, opening like a flower or a wound. The rat stays back, and Dan wonders if rats are nocturnal.

“Do you see this, Ratty?”

And it is only now that Dan notices that the lights haven’t come back on. Yet he sees the tape elevated within the compartment, sees the red blood oozing from its casing. It isn’t the surprise he thought it would be, being able to see in darkness. It makes sense. dan is a receptacle now, receiving data, and he was given this path and he followed it, light or no light.

Light. The lights come back on, brilliant but obscuring. The blood is gone but the cassette is slippery, but that might be from the sweat of his palms. He inserts it and presses play.

The horrors unravel into his ears, and before the last word is spoken he is packing up his things – tapes he wants to keep, clothes he will need. The story is complete. He’s heard all of it. Or, not all, but he can extrapolate the rest. Something is coming, the song told him that, the tapes said so, so Dan must run.

As if on cue, the electricity goes out again. The light disappears. Dan still hurries through the archives, coaxing Ratty onto his shoulder. Something he will regret doing.

The door crashes open and light spills onto the threshold, illuminating the way once again. Except… except there is something standing there. Something pale and oozing and unnatural.

An abomination.

It greets Dan by name, and calls itself Samuel. At first, Dan cannot rationalize why Samuel has turned into this… thing, this amalgamation of pus and holes and barely muscle, but his frantic brain is still analysing, has latched onto Samuel’s appearance… if one has spent a lifetime opening doors then perhaps his own flesh will open too…

Samuel’s voice is cavernous as he talks at Dan, like any good villain. He knows his role.

“Everyone participates. No one observes. Curiosity has its consequences. I believe my current form is evidence of that. Oh – you have a rat on your shoulder.”

“His name is Ratty,” Dan helpfully supplies, for whatever reason. Naming the dead, perhaps. He knows the story.

“Aww, come here Ratty,” Samuel says, and the heart on Dan’s sleeve obeys, stiffly walking over to the mucus-body in the doorway.

It gets in one last squeak at Dan before its head is bitten off.

Samuel eats Ratty. The story consumes Dan, the parts of Dan that resisted, that clung to Mark and Tanya and hiking. Now dan is all story, all drive, so when Samuel commands him to sit dan sits. And when Samuel asks him to listen to the first tape, dan does.

There isn’t much to it, but it leaves a sting in the air when it is finished. Insult before injury - Samuel looks horrendous and satisfied. The sting intensifies until it becomes pressure, becomes pain, skin-deep and meandering, like something sharp is pressing against dan.

“Well, what are you waiting for?” Samuel’s voice, increasingly disembodied, snaps dan out of the narrative and into more concrete matters. “I don’t expect your bosses will treat you kindly, if they catch you.”

“Shit.”

Time begins to tear around dan. He is already at the door before he hears Samuel’s parting, “Good luck Daniel, and thank you!” Decaying branches break under his feet before he hears the building start to collapse. He risks a look back and sees how thin the veneer was, like eggshell, how all Visser needed was just one person to listen to a couple dozen tapes. Now something grey, bulging, and somehow geometrical is visible within the archives.

Dan keeps running. He finds his feet in the act and the fear. He almost finds himself, the part that got eaten. He thinks of Mark. He thinks of hiding. But he cares about Mark enough to not go to him, at least not physically. Instead, he leaves him a frantic voicemail and his recordings and keeps running. They’re behind him, now. His employers. He doesn’t think that they’ll accept his resignation letter now.

* * *

He’s right. They’re dead set on finding him, and they finally do. The door to his hotel room takes three kicks before folding in on itself.

In that time, Dan – dan – he’s been hiding. Or, trying to. His hand has been on the doorknob more times than he can count, fully prepared to run out there and confront them, shake the information out of them to make them tell him what had just happened, why they had done this to him – but common sense prevailed, or the voice at the back of his head prevailed, or someone else entirely, even, and he had stayed in the room. Not eating, not drinking.

Which is probably why he’s subdued easily. That, and the impressive private military force they send in on him.

Dan is thrown in a van. Head in a cloth bag, the works. His teeth chatter, loud in the hot, slightly damp space around his head. He’s in the dark about where they’re taking him. Where are they taking him?

Dan has heard people say ‘splitting headaches’ before. The phrase is what immediately comes to mind when he sees the interior of the van.

He yells in pain, but the soldiers sitting next to him don’t take note, probably accustomed to their loud hostages. Instead, they take notice when he stops yelling, stops making any noise at all. He cranes his neck, trying to glean all the information he can from his now-visible surroundings. He looks around the unilluminating van, and jumps. A black cloth sack sits right on his shoulder, right where Ratty –

His thoughts are interrupted when the van takes a corner too fast and the black sack bangs against the wall of the van. It hurts. He realizes with a start that he can see the fabric folding in and out, keeping time with his breathing. It’s him in there, he realizes. A splitting headache, an out-of-body experience, maybe –

“What the fuck,” a voice beside him says, somehow managing to not sound astonished at the two-headed monstrosity sitting next to her. It takes less time than dan would like to get another bag over his head.

It seems they were prepared.

Deprived of information yet again, the darkness slowly, slowly resolves itself into one darkness, and the cloth bag falls off Dan’s shoulder, empty.

The van rolls on. Dan just keeps getting more scared.

The van finally stops and several things happen in quick succession.

Dan is hustled off the van at a near run. The ground changes to tile and sterile air sifts through the bag over his head. They move down corridors, Dan’s whole body shaking like his last glimpse of the archives. He hears voices through open doors, speaking corporate jargon about holdings and acquiring assets, and he swears he even hears Davenport talking about the ‘necessary paperwork’.

Dan is shaking so much it is getting hard to put one foot in front of the other. He is slightly comforted by his location, though. Why bring him into an office building if they were going to kill him?

He is led down some stairs. The air in the basement is cooler and more… charged. It stings. There is an audible hum from something large and electric.

“Daniel Powell.” The words are not quite human and not quite computer. “Weight: 135 pounds. Height: 5 feet 9 inches. Hair colour: brown. Eye colour: brown. Clearance: 3. Destination: The City.”

Dan feels no one around him anymore. The space is small. And the thing at the opposite wall won’t stop humming.

“Transfer sequence initiated. Preparing medium.” The humming rises to a shriek.

“Please walk forward, Daniel Powell.”

No response. Dan’s back is pressed against the wall. No way in hell or heaven is he ever taking a step in that direction.

“Subject transportation initiated. Transmission in five.” Dan’s foot slips forward. He is being pushed from behind. Pushed forward. Inexorable. Has he ever had a choice?

The shriek hits a note, impossibly high.

At least the story gave him a choice. His employers had not.

“Three. Two.” Dan’s feet slide onto something soft. Something whispering.

“One.”

dan is peeled away from himself, taking his anger and his knowledge with him to another city. Dan steps out on the other side of the portal, shaking and confused. dan is disassembled and reassembled in another place, another plane, unbalanced and unconscious.

And Dan begins to run.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "is this what youve been thinking of for 2 yrs??" yeah  
> also made an outpost playlist in the meantime: [8tracks](https://8tracks.com/eleventhsin/outpost-vibes) (if 8tracks doesnt work you can at least look at the cover i made)  
> and yet i still have a whole damn OST for this fic left over. my work is never finished


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> in case you haven't guessed, this is all an attempt to explain that one train tape. driving me nuts

“Oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck—”

Dan’s curses land flat on the New York streets and are trampled underneath his shoes. He runs, tripping over his untied sneakers, looking over his shoulder, his open coat flapping in the wind. He bounces off walls and people alike. As long as he keeps moving, they won’t catch him.

If he stops running, he dies.

“Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck—”

His shoe flies off his foot and he hears it fall behind him like a gavel. Dan comes to a reluctant stop in the alley. The dread is overwhelming, it has filled his heart and his stomach and probably his liver, but Dan has just enough leftover courage to turn and –

And Dan is in a New York alleyway with one shoe on his foot and one shoe several meters in front of him, having just escaped from the omnipotent company that has tailed him for weeks, and he cannot move. If he takes those dozen steps back towards the motel, the trap will shut around his leg and he will be caught, finally caught, and they will take him to an unknown warehouse and torture him and—

Dan is hyperventilating. He crouches, wrapping his arms around his chest, trying to get himself back into working condition, and all the while conscious that he is losing time, what are you doing, you have to keep running RUN DAN RUN

Dan springs up and takes off down the alley, one socked foot painfully reverberating against the concrete. He doesn’t stop running for a very long time.

**ssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssSLAP**

dan arrives in this painful world at the blow, his shattered consciousness slinking into his skull like a wounded dog – slowly. Growling. He gasps at the disruption; the air is stale and largely unhelpful. His second breath remains so, but it doesn’t matter - it is the inhale of a man being thrown into the ocean with weights around his ankles. Within two seconds of consciousness he is aware of the tsunami, the avalanche, the category 5 hurricane of hurt that is about to overwhelm him.

He knows how these things go. He can see the surgical tools.

The thing above him chatters cheerfully. “You’re going to become something beautiful and dangerous and new,” it says, positioning the surrounding machinery with its many arms, cocooning them in monitors and scalpels. dan struggles, of course he struggles, but his legs twitch uselessly at the end of the operating table. dan cannot run.

A flash of crooked teeth because dan doesn’t want to look at the eyes. “I really am sorry about the pain.” And dan is enveloped. dan is annihilated.

dan remains on the table, on the assembly line – dan remains under the knife as it strips him like wire and connects him to things that are too warm for machine and far too sharp for body. His screams turn magnetic in his throat and run back down like honey to spool in his chest… wait, he knows this feeling –

Fate mimics the cruel twist of the knife inside him as dan’s shackles become his anchor. He digs his nails into the feeling of being recorded and holds on, holds on until he can hold on no longer. Feelings alone offer no strength, dan’s metaphorical hands weaken and his grasp on his body breaks. The thing’s grasp on his body tightens. It does not matter. dan is no longer in it.

An obscene insertion, a click. In the hollow left behind by his soul two voices begin to churn, speaking of messengers and sacrifice. dan gratefully leaves his body to the butchering and escapes to that place in which only the story exists and nothing else.

**whiiiiiiiirrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr**

Dan doesn’t make the mistake of returning to the motel – he’s seen enough movies where the FBI or the mafia or the enormous shady corporation stakes out the victim’s place of residence and nabs them when they return for supplies. Instead, and very luckily, Dan relies on the cash that he had stored inside the lining of his coat the evening before his door was broken down. He is aware that the cash is limited, after which he will need to find a way to get money for food. He is aware of a lot of things.

Like the café door opening, and the crash that follows shortly after. It only makes him flinch slightly, now. Dan has learned that on the days when the clumsy baker opens the store, they usually knock something over within the first 10 minutes.

Over his chattering teeth he can hear doors opening and alarms being disabled as the other businesses on the street start their days. The traffic is picking up, and the trucks roaring by his alley introduce blind spots into his awareness. As the city awakens it becomes harder and harder to distinguish the sounds of his pursuers from the general, unthreatening noise. With a groan, Dan unfolds his cramped limbs and hobbles in the opposite direction, out of the city, where it will be quieter and easier to spot those who are coming for him.

**whiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiirrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr**

“Wake up. Can you move? Oh good. Now, would you like to see what you’ve become?”

The words are crystal clear, completely at odds with his hazy surroundings. Bright lights kaleidoscope before his eyes, intensifying as the lab coat disappears from his bedside. dan blinks up at them, nauseous and pained. He turns his head gingerly at the approaching footsteps.

The thing that enters the room again is hard to look at. dan suspects that isn’t entirely due to his gradually coagulating vision. It… shifts, its lab coat swaying even as it stands perfectly still, examining him back. dan avoids its eyes. Instead, he looks at its hands.

It is holding a mirror. and dan…

There is no pushback. There are no qualms or trepidations. dan doesn’t turn away from the mirror and occupy his mind with inconsequential things like rats or interpersonal conflict.

“Now, mirrors aren’t exactly allowed in the outpost, but I snuck one in, it’ll be our little secret, alright?” it says, and holds it up.

dan looks into the mirror. dan sees himself for what feels like the first time.

It is horrific.

His head snaps down to look at the damage on his own skin. Or, tries to. He appreciates the need for the mirror now, as his head does not make it very far. Probably on account of the steel rods.

“Reinforcements,” the creature supplies helpfully when dan reaches up to tug at one of them.

It does look like his body has been… reinforced… quite thoroughly. Metal shines up at him from gashes in his legs, and he can hear the hiss of hydraulics when he wiggles what passes for his toes. All probably to support the extra weight in added onto – _into_ him.

His chest is completely massacred. The front was peeled back like curtains or like a faceplate, never reinstalled again for quicker access to faulty wiring. dan makes out two speakers and a cassette player, sandwiched between objects of unknown purpose or origin. In the gaps, the obscene pinks and purples of organs glisten. Possibly his.

He notes that he recognizes the tape player more than he recognizes his own body.

His probing fingers catch on the multicoloured wires threading through his ribs, and a sickly pull registers in his mind. He pulls harder and considers throwing up. The thing’s eyes widen in… dan doesn’t know. It’s hard to know anything about it.

“You don’t like it?” the shifting body in front of him asks, sounding wounded. When dan laughs, the air moves between the bars of his ribcage, and the chill makes him sob.

Moving hurts. Talking is uncomfortable. Removing the tape is excruciating.

“I want to talk to Davenport.”

The creature wheedles at him, whines when he strains his legs, but nevertheless leads him from the operating table and into the building.

dan vaguely senses the enormous space around him, but his mind makes the unwelcome connection between its purple hue and the colours he saw inside himself. Instead, he chooses to focus on his quest to shake some answers out of Davenport. He practices his questions. Where am I. Where is Melody. Why me, and for how long.

“…that built it. I was planning on giving you a tour, after you had rested for a few days,” the creature throws him an approximation of a reproachful glance over its contorted shoulder as it leads him forward. “You’re a very bad patient, you know that?”

Moving is tough. Metal is usually valued for its rigidity, not for its ability to mesh well with the human body. Which is why he, out of breath and in pain, is surprised when he answers with a snarky retort.

“You don’t exactly have the best bedside manner.”

The creature does a kind of sideways shuffle, a movement that doesn’t seem possible to do with only two legs, and gives him an appraising look.

“Ooh I like this determined Dan; he’s all ‘take charge’ and ‘take no prisoners’. Perhaps a side effect of the operation?” it muses. “It’s so interesting to see how you react, you know this is the first meld I’ve performed?”

Another loop of questions begins to run parallel with the ones he’s been practising, his brain trying to connect the dots. What other side effects. What have you performed. And…

“You remind me of someone.”

The being doesn’t react, just replying, “I have one of those voices.”

This is the part of the story where the protagonist should be wailing or frozen in fear. dan should be afraid of the potential side effects, the answers to his questions, but there is a hollow where there should be terror. Whatever this thing had removed from his body, it took fear with it.

“Hey there, champ.”

dan sees red at the familiar degrading greeting. He takes a page out of the surgeon’s book.

“I want answers. Now. Or I will rip this thing from my body and I don’t care what happens.”

Suit’s mouth contorts around the southern drawl.

“Well, I’ve got to tell you that would be breaking contract—”

Dan reaches past his ribs, pushing aside something slimy and cold, grasping the whirring tape in his recesses, and pulls.

The pain is immense, bigger than his body, but dan keeps pulling at the flesh and wire fusing the recorder to his body until things start snapping, until the creature’s hands are fluttering against his skin like moths beating against windows, begging the light not to go out, until dan collapses against his steel struts and Davenport’s tone changes to ice.

“Alright, Mr. Powell.”

dan’s hand falls limply to his side. The steel in his legs tears his tendons to shreds, now that he isn’t supporting himself, and he watches the blood collect on the concrete as he listens to Davenport inform him he is stuck at the outpost. As if he didn’t already know.

Davenport goes back to his body in the real world. dan acclimates the only way he knows how.

Of course he follows the thing in the lab coat as it shows him the outpost, always a few steps ahead of him, egging him on – “Just a few rooms down. Through here. Follow follow follow!” Its bulging back disappearing through doorways.

When dan’s heart – tape gives out, it’s of no surprise. A catch – a catch – a catch – when dan’s heart gives out—

dan awakens on the thing’s misshapen shoulder, the blood rushing to his head.

It deposits him on a somewhat soft surface, and dan groans as the heavy mass inside his abdomen shifts at the changing pressure. It croons at him.

“It’s alright Dan, just go to sleep. I want you to get better. Sleep and have good dreams!” It scurries out of the room, and dan passes out mid-sob.

**rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr**

Once, not so long ago, Dan would go running in the park every morning. The chilly air would sting his nose, but he powered through it, thinking himself brave and strong. Afterwards, he would go back to his apartment and fix himself a nice breakfast and sit down with his coffee to study.

He used to think he was tough.

Thud thud thud thud thud thud thud skitter-

A rock bounces off Dan’s shoe and hits a dumpster, echoing loudly. Dan turns his flinch into a leap forward and runs faster, hand on his pocket.

He’s been running so fast and for so long that it feels like he’s flying. He whips past the city blocks now. He’s so fast that, even if they did see him at the bank, they would never catch him.

With a final push he clears the apartment rows and punches into the industrial sector. As he runs past the stationary trains a smile grows on his face until he’s laughing, he’s sprinting and laughing and the sky is pink with the rising sun.

“Yes!” Dan whoops, leaping and bounding along the tracks. He plunges his hand into his coat pocket and withdraws a stack of bills, looking at them with a goofy grin on his face before throwing his fists in the air.

“Eat it!” he yells at his pursuers.

The morning is beautiful and Dan is ecstatic, euphoric. They can’t catch him! They didn’t catch him at the library, they didn’t catch him at the subway, they didn’t catch him at the bank just now. Even when they had their knees on his back on the floor of the motel room, even THEN he had slipped right past them.

“You can’t catch me!”

Then a sound from the end of the yard sends him bolting, scampering off the gravel and through the rows of trains, disappearing again into the back streets.

**rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr**

Bed rest doesn’t help when it hurts no matter what position the body is in.

Still, the creature turns out to be a gifted whiner so dan takes his bed rest like he takes his lumps. They shift beneath him. dan feels like a goddamn U-Haul, transporting unknown goods for unknown customers. The objects don’t feel too secure; dan has been woken several times by the sound of plastic tumbling off the bed and onto the floor. However, when he wakes up the next… well, time is difficult without windows. When he wakes from those nights, there is never anything missing from his collection of body parts, and the fuzzy feeling around his edges makes him suspect that his colleague isn’t above covert repairs.

However, his colleague also isn’t above turning a blind eye to his wanderings, so dan assigns him a net zero score and trudges around the outpost. His flesh heals remarkably quickly; his legs don’t bleed upon walking anymore.

It is both airy and chaotic, like a cathedral after a war. Large concrete cubes protrude from every surface, giving the impression that they’ve fallen from the crumbling ceiling high above. dan only suspects it is crumbling due to the streams of sand that sometimes meander their way down to the floor. The ceiling itself is too far away to see on account of the purple smog that obscures the vast space.

The outpost is quiet, but the ambient hum is deafening. The purple shades of the atmosphere drape themselves over all surfaces like royalty, lounging like conquerors, proud to claim another piece of land. dan trudges through the murk, exploring what he can. It’s like he is someplace so strange and so removed from humanity that his base instincts have been excised: fear, hunger, grief – dan can’t even mourn his body. He isn’t sure he wants to, but he is acutely aware that he hasn’t eaten in days every time he passes the cafeteria.

He does, however, still sleep. And now he understands the surgeon’s words – to pray for good dreams, because dreams will always come.

For the third night in a row, a knife is held at his throat by long-fingered hands.

“What to want? You want escape? Home?”

As if in a recurring nightmare, rooted to the floor, dan can only manage a weak, “I…”

“You pause. Work together. Hate this place. Hate these people. Do not trust.”

dan nods at the ancient sleepy voice with a knife. He can do hate. He can do no trust.

That is, until his two colleagues cut off and out and only the terrifying choir remains and Brown deflates from Suit like an insecure helium balloon and dan is left standing at the radio transistor helplessly repeating, “Come in. Over. Come in. Over.”

Then, all of a sudden, dan finds himself not inclined to hate them at all.

“Oh, I am sorry Dan, it appears as if they are headed into nothingness and void and wandering while terrifying creatures pursue them,” states the creature at his elbow, not sounding sorry at all.

dan quite agrees. He has no inclination to fail his first task, however.

“You said that the device, my body, could connect to them?”

The inventor of the radio transistor manages to sound even more thrilled. “Yes! But that will be quite dangerous. But interesting! But mostly dangerous. Are you certain? You would be breaking contract.”

dan braces himself against the desk. “What are they going to do, file a lawsuit?”

With a delighted laugh more befitting a toddler on the teacup rides, the surgeon sets about to fulfill its duties again. By the end of the impromptu operation, they are both bleeding and dan has a few more wires where he is certain his heart should be.

“But they heard me. I think they heard me,” dan mumbles into the thing’s bloody lab coat as it half-drags him away.

“They may have. And now you need to rest. That was very brave and noble and stupid. Come on.”

He’s collapsed onto his bed. Before the thing scurries away, his hand catches its coat sleeve.

He’s trying to remember the story. The plot is jumbled in his head – was it right, to save Clara and Lou? Was that how it went? Why doesn’t he remember? Is he telling it wrong?

“I- did that help them? Do you think?” he manages at the silhouette.

He can tell it is being gentle when it replies.

“Everyone dies eventually, Dan. Well, most people. Sweet dreams.”

dan dreams of being out there, no Clara or Lou in sight. Nobody at all. The suburban roads of his childhood surround him, radiating away in every direction. He turns in place but cannot see the path he is supposed to take.

**zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz**

Dan mechanically eats a $2 burrito outside the corner store, his back pressed against its wall. He honestly wishes it were tasteless, but unfortunately someone decided to put guacamole in it, followed by a months-long sit in the slightly refrigerated section, judging by the texture. Still, it’s calories.

Yeah, he was surprised too, he thinks at the rat that lives in his memory. He even checked the nutritional label to be sure.

Dan chews thoughtfully. He needn’t suffer like this, he thinks. The running and hiding are all necessary, but he has enough money to spend more than $3 a meal.

He logged in to his bank account through a library computer a few days ago. The statements showed that he was still, somehow, receiving biweekly payments from the people hunting him down. There had even been a slight pay increase.

It didn’t –it still doesn’t make sense. Dan scents danger in the air, a trap, but he just doesn’t understand where it is. It would be so much easier to let him starve, to make him do something drastic – he doesn’t even work for them anymore!

He wants to talk it through with someone. Mark. He misses Mark.

The wrapper is empty in his hand. Dan looks down the alley at the human shape at the far end of it. Wearily, he gets to his feet, and backs into the lunch time crowd.

**“Have you seen the “often, I’d say “so lucky “talk to you “was visiting my “**

“Wake up.”

dan’s mechanical arm is shaken gently. The dream ends.

“Wake up.”

The first words out of dan’s mouth are almost “Thank you.” Instead, he says, “I didn’t dream,” like a guilty child.

No trust.

He needn’t have bothered.

“Now why would you lie about something like that?” the shape above him asks, and dan flinches back, seeing steel and replacement parts –

“You and me, we’re always dreaming.”

dan avoids the thing’s bright, disconcerting eyes. Its line of sight somehow resembles those paths, out in the wasteland: meandering and open and ready to be taken up on the invitation—

dan sits up. “Clara. Lou. Are they ok? Did they come back yet?”

“No sign of them! But come, Suit says it is scheduled.”

When no help materializes from Mr. Brown, dan storms to the archives. The thing trails after him, but dan sends it off.

“I’m going to the archive. You shouldn’t follow me.”

He isn’t going down that road. Not with that abomination. dan is still human.

A wire comes loose from in between his second and third rib, discharging an electric shock across his skin. dan shoves it back in with only a minimum of screaming.

Entering the archives is unsettling. It is eerie how well LMG has preserved the layout in the transfer across realities. dan’s feet start moving almost on their own accord, following the familiar path to the logbook, reliably laying where it always was. It is so familiar that dan can almost see the past versions of himself, an infinite line of dans, walking this path with him.

He follows the ghostly procession and they disperse into the archives, some branching off into one corridor or another, until dan is in the furthest recesses of the archive. Here the lights flicker on and off and the veil of the past is thin. Here, his ghosts doggedly catalogue Archive 81 long after they lose their legs and their lungs are taken from them.

Unsettled, dan opens his eyes and begins to search for tapes relating to transport.

The tape he shoves into his tape player contains half an interview and the sound of flapping wings, which is very quickly interrupted by the thing in the lab coat barging in and stealing the rest.

“Got your tapes!” it yells, running off in the direction of the cafeteria.

“I’m really not in the mood, you – whatever you are!” dan complains after it.

By the time he arrives at the cafeteria, the microwave is on and the smell of burning plastic is wafting through the air.

“Sit down and I can watch you eat,” says the abductor and sets a warm tray in front of him.

It feels like forcing a volleyball under the water. It feels like the worst hangover. It feels like inserting a CD into a cassette player. It is rejection on the deepest level.

Rejection, rejection, rejection. The cracker turns to ash on his tongue.

“I guess I’m not hungry.” dan’s hands clench and unclench on the cafeteria table. Bright eyes analyze him from across the table.

“How long has it been since you last ate?”

How long has it been since you drank water? How long has it been since you were home? Do you sweat? Can you cry? How long has it been since you were a human, dan—

“Since the goddamn motel room!” dan roars, flinging the tray at the wall with his toolbox of a hand. The being doesn’t flinch, doesn’t show any indication of remorse or satisfaction. After a beat, dan finds none within himself, either.

“I’ll clean that up,” he says, wondering if there is anyone else in the outpost to notice a rotting meal.

“It’s not so bad. You’ll get used to it,” the being says, handing him some paper towels. “At least you won’t have to eat peaches.”

The atmosphere glitches around him, flesh replaces his left hand. The taste of peaches returns to his tongue and his saliva runs thick and his heartbeat picks up, cold air in the lungs he hasn’t felt in weeks, like he’s running –

“Wait. How do you know about the peaches?”

dan listens with a hollow chest as it tells him it was a fan of the podcast. To his horror, its cheeks begin to approximate a blush as it talks.

“So, I told myself I wouldn’t do this when you came in here, I was like, hey, let’s remember that you’re going to be his surgeon and his colleague and maybe his friend but I really want to clear up some things and I’m a really big fan and I DID support the Patreon and can I ask you some questions?”

Its words serve to turn the wheel on his wind-up-toy back and his head begins to rattle in response. Memories dredge up like corpses from water, just beneath the surface and just as disturbing. Just as bloated and unrecognizable. dan scratches at his metal arm uneasily.

“I don’t have anything to do with the goddamn Patreon! And you probably know more about the mystery stuff than I do! And now I’m talking like you. Fuck it – go ahead!”

As it asks him about military time and rats and Melody he begins to see double again, an old echo of his Archive 81 days, except this time, it’s intrusion – except, this time, there’s something scratching at his skull from the outside. dan feels hollow despite the objects crowding his body.

“…and I didn’t like Tanya,” finishes the – his –

“You know he whole ‘not having a name’ thing is really getting old,” dan blurts out.

Its eyes blink at him in surprise.

“Oh, is it bothering you?” it asks quietly.

“Yes!” dan answers emphatically, fully aware he is grabbing at a rope attached to an enemy vessel, yet unable to stop himself.

But it is gentle and sincere when it says, “I apologize,” and that somehow eases his agitation back into his skin so by the time they settle on Rat he feels present once more. Perhaps more present, even. The scratching ends, and his fingernails come away from the metal mangled.

“It’s not a very flattering nickname,” dan informs it.

“Oh, I wouldn’t want it to be,” says Rat, and dan understands, somehow. Through barriers of skin and humanity, dan understands.

“And I’m sorry if you didn’t want to answer question about the podcast.”

“No, it’s fine, it’s just… I guess the body’s still painful.” dan’s hand drifts to his metal arm again. “It hurts to walk, and there’s an itch near my left side that just won’t go away—"

“Daniel, I sympathize but I don’t apologize,” Rat interrupts him. “But oh! I bet enough time has passed, you should probably go back and listen to another tape! Here you go!”

Rat thrusts the tapes into his arms and shoos him into the hallway. dan trudges back to the archive, no longer seeing double but still thinking about duplicates and duplicating. Creating something in a monster’s image.

The second half of the interview does not help. dan stands in the archive, hearing the echoes of a man’s transformation in his… ears. Tape?

Time to do some firsthand research.

As dan tracks Suit through the outpost, he ponders his situation almost clinically. Judging from the times his heart-tape has given out or was almost taken out, his hearing is intimately connected to the recording, if not fully integrated. So that means, even if he manages to find a way to restore his body, his hearing would most definitely be lost. Deaf-initely, dan chuckles to himself.

He’d miss Death Grips.

Distantly, Suit’s song filters through the smog. dan follows it until he finds Suit standing outside Brown’s office. He has to shake them until the singing halts abruptly.

“I was malfunctioning.”

“Yeah. Uh, can I speak to someone who can…”

“Fill me out?”

“Yes.”

“No one is currently scheduled to perform that action.”

“Oh. Do you… know anything about TOC or LMG or… anything?”

Suit looks through him. “When I am empty, I do not have any information other than what is required to perform my duties.”

dan looks at them. Tries to really look, the kind of examination he would need to describe someone to a sketch artist. Again, it is difficult. Their face is almost already one-dimensional, as if someone had taken an eraser to their face. Not only were all wrinkles removed but shading was too, making it impossible to distinguish any defining features.

Not someone. Rat. Rat did this.

“Do you remember anything, about your old life? Before they changed you?”

Eraser shavings fall to the floor.

“I am empty, Daniel Powell.”

“I’m sorry. If there’s something left of a person in there, I’m sorry.”

Empty casings fall to their feet. By all accounts, dan should feel their impact.

“Your colleague was very thorough.”

Insulated by misinterpretation. No mirrors in the outpost. Seen through the eyes of the creator only.

Back in the archives, dan listens to the man, Tim, transformed, hum the Messenger theme and repeat back the words about wings and doors that Beth had told him previously.

Recognition in the image.

**zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz**

Dan walks laps around the apartment building. The couple in the coffee shop across the street stare at him. He switches routes to walk laps around the block. The shadows elongate underneath his recently-purchased, already-worn-down sneakers.

Of course he shouldn’t be here.

But he remembers the concern in Mark’s voice, and he sees the Housing Historical Committee around every corner. He deserves to see his friend.

That is, if Mark hasn’t been bought out or killed, and his apartment isn’t filled with enemy agents.

The streets lights flicker on one by one, illuminating the way. Dan follows their lead back to Mark’s building.

When he returns, Mark’s apartment window is lit up. He can see the top of Mark’s head at the kitchen table, presumably eating dinner. Dan’s chest aches. He stands like that for some time, watching the window. He doesn’t want to be rude and interrupt. Dan’s skin crawls when he realizes how well he’s been trained by Davenport. He could never handle interruptions.

With quick movements, Dan crosses the street and dials decisively. Mark picks up on the fourth ring.

“Hey, Mark.”

Silence. Silence. Silence. Silence.

“Holy shit.”

A click, and the door opens. The familiar stale air, still smelling faintly of French fries, somehow leaves Dan breathless.

“Dan.”

Dan opens his eyes. Has he been standing here long enough for Mark to descend to the ground floor?

“You… look pretty horrible,” his friend says, and Dan tries to laugh, but what comes out is more of a hiccupping noise.

“Good to see you, too,” he manages.

The ride up is unbearably quiet, the elevator seeming sluggish with the weight of things unsaid. Mark’s apartment, too, is strange. Gone are the games and records that Dan remembers. Instead, all available surfaces are crowded with papers. Dan didn’t see Mark eating dinner, he realizes. Instead, a large schematic lays on the table, a pen and notebook on top.

“What is all this?” Dan asks as Mark clears the couch of paper.

“Well, you asked me to do some research for you…” Mark is as careful with his words as he is with the papers. “And it turns out your, ah, band was more, ah… Oh whatever. Your company is shady as hell.”

“You’re telling me,” Dan says. He inclines his head to read some text.

The writing is formatted like a script. “…think about the previous scenes, cast your mind into them, inhabit the space and the story of the play—”

“NO!” Mark yells, snatching the paper away mid-sentence. Dan is deposited back into the apartment abruptly.

“Dan you _know_ the dangers of bearing witness to stories!” Mark hisses at him. “I cannot believe you.” He paces away and then turns back. “I cannot believe you!”

“I’m sorry,” Dan tries, but Mark just steamrolls over him.

“Do you have any idea how hard I’ve searched – I didn’t sleep, Dan – I filed reports, I called everyone, NOBODY knew anything about you – I even called Tanya! Again! And when nothing worked, and nothing kept working for – for weeks, for months – all I could do was sit at my computer and read! Do you know how many times I’ve refreshed New York’s missing persons page, Dan?”

“Mark, I am s – so sorry,” Dan says into the silence, and his words roll away from them like marbles. “I had to stay away. I can leave, if you want, I understand if you don’t want anything to do with this anymore—”

Mark laughs hollowly and gestures around him. “I think it’s too late for that.”

“Yeah. Yeah.”

“Well,” Mark sighs. “Sit down. Let’s talk about this. Do you want anything?”

Dan sits down on the couch where he sat so many times before as Mark busies himself in the kitchen. Over the sound of the water Mark says, “I got your recordings, by the way. I don’t know if you saw, but they’re up there now.”

Dan winces. “That’s… probably not good.”

“Yeah, I also came to that conclusion. After they were published, of course.”

“Of course,” Dan says absent-mindedly, still looking around the room. There are drawings among the words – a city, a building, several sketches of… wings?

“Dan, do you want to talk about what happened? In the archives?”

“Not really,” Dan says weakly. “I mean, you know everything, if you’ve gone through the recordings… I don’t really have anything to add…”

“Alright, that’s fine. What have you been doing for the past,” Mark makes a show of checking his calendar as he comes back into the room, “two months?”

“Two months? Jesus. Running, mostly. Hiding. Had a couple of close calls – they even busted down my door – but I outran them all. They’re having a hard time catching me,” Dan grins.

Mark had come over to set some tea in front of him, but at his words he flinches back, spilling hot water on his hand. He hardly seems to notice. He backs away from Dan.

“Uh, sorry, let me get you another cup,” he says, backing into the kitchen. Dan shrugs and returns to staring at the notes.

“So let me get this straight,” Mark calls from beyond the doorway. “They busted down your door, and let you just walk out?”

“No. I mean, almost? They had me pinned down, but… it’s confusing. They had me pinned and then suddenly I wasn’t. They should probably train their goons more. I just grabbed my shoes and ran!”

Something orange flies out of the kitchen and strikes him on the shoulder. “Ow!” Dan says, frowning at the kitchen. Mark watches him from the doorway, his eyes guarded.

“You look like you have scurvy,” he says, and that finally gets Dan to laugh. Mark returns with a plate of crackers, a lukewarm bowl of soup, and a new cup of tea, and takes the chair opposite Dan.

“Eat.”

“Thanks.” Dan bites into the orange. “How about you tell me what you’ve been up to as I eat your food?”

The plates on the table are empty and the clock has no business being at the hour it is at when Mark concludes his story with, “So yeah. I’ve been trying to save you.” He says it like he’s talking about someone else. Someone who is still lost.

“What am I, canned peaches? I’m here now,” Dan laughs uneasily, and Mark squints at him, unconvinced.

“Are you s – have you seen yourself recently?” Mark tries to give the sentence a joking tone at the end, but all it does is make the question sound more cruel. A silence.

“And anyway, I’m in some deep shit now. I can’t just walk out of it. I have people depending on me. Dan—” Mark sighs wearily. “Do you know anything about LMG? Have you heard anything, or done any research, or…”

Dan is already shaking his head. “No, I’m staying far away from them. I didn’t even know they were called LMG. Actually, I’ve been reading about trains recently, you know how I was into them for a while? Well, since I’ve been camped out near—" he shoots Mark a nervous glance. “Uh, near them, that’s what I’ve been reading at the library.” He shifts anxiously on the couch. “I have a lot of free time now.”

He’s been here too long. His legs have been still too long. Mark’s looking at him with something sad in his eyes. It resembles pity.

Mark sighs. “Dan…”

It has become hard to exist within this room. It’s the disappointment in Mark’s eyes, and Dan doesn’t even understand why it’s there… He probably could have handled things better but for fuck’s sake! He managed to outsmart LMG despite the odds, despite the massive disparity between resources.

It’s the scrutinizing looks. The secrets in Mark’s apartment, the things kept from one another are crowding Dan out the door. Like there’s no room for him, even in this lessened state. Dan retracts into himself on the couch, begins casting nervous glances towards the doors.

“Well, I hope you know what you’re doing. I don’t have to tell you how dangerous they are. You’re smarter than me.” Dan looks around. “I should go. I’ve been here too long.” Mark’s papers stick to his mind like sweaty palms.

“Alright, alright,” Mark holds his hands up placatingly at Dan’s distressed movements. “But I actually might have something for you…” Mark gets up and begins to search around the apartment. “It might do you some good…”

Dan scoots to the edge of the couch, ready to bolt at the first sign of—

“Aha!”

Triumphantly, Mark turns around, holding a small device. Dan jumps up from the couch and stands there, caught on a pin’s head that is the years of friendship and trust he has with Mark. Mark takes this in stride. With deliberately slow movements he extends his hand to Dan.

“What is that, an MP3 player?” Dan asks. “Thanks Mark, you didn’t have to travel back in time for me.”

Mark shivers, turning his head away from the words as if to avoid them.

Finally he says, “No, Dan. A digital voice recorder. I know,” he interrupts Dan’s protests, “I know that you’ve had some bad – okay, the worst experience of your life using something similar, but I just thought it might provide some stability. Something familiar.” Mark shrugs. “You don’t have to take it.

Dan is already reaching for it. “No, I’ll take it. Just don’t expect any more recordings,” he jokes.

“Well if you ever want to get back into it… I set up your previous podcast. You can be a return customer.”

Dan swallows back his accusations – you’re also the one who didn’t keep his shit secure – and pockets the recorder.

“You sure you don’t want to crash here for the night?”

“No. I have to get going. Thanks, Mark.”

“Of course. Please, Dan, if you need help, anything, drop by.”

**zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz**

dan’s metal arm whirrs as it rewinds an unhelpful tape about space. Likewise, dan stands in the archives and tries to remember. The few memories he does have are in the archives, brought to life as ghosts, possibly worse off for it. He watches one of his past selves gesture at something invisible and small – Ratty. His heart twists.

Except. Except. Does he even reach the top shelf? And as he looks closer at the ghostly procession of his selves before him, he notices discrepancies – hair colour, height, posture, and he realizes he cannot tell what is correct, and what is wrong.

What is wrong with him? What does he look like?

He scrambles to visualize his self – skin colour, haircut, his nose, _anything_ – and in his desperation he grabs the ghost directly in front of him and spins it around to face him.

Its face looks like nothing, Melody. Like absolutely nothing.

With a cry, dan forces his eyes open. He’s shaking so much that the logbook is jittering around on the table.

He’s losing himself, time, memories, the past, the future. How long has he been here?

He hurries out of the archive. The haunting doesn’t stop with the change in scenery. He is haunted by them in the hallways, too. When he compares his crumbling memories with the ghosts, they only add up because they’re both decaying. There’s something not quite there, something is missing, but the information is lost to noise.

“Hey. Hey! Stop pacing around and staring off into the distance,” Clara interrupts his pacing and staring off into the distance.

“I was thinking, Clara. I’m allowed to think,” dan says waspishly.

“Were you thinking about the ocean we saw? Then I don’t care. Do your job and listen to some tapes about the ocean.”

dan frowns at the explorer. “You’re in here with me, you know that?”

Clara’s lip curls upward slightly.

“I’ve got all my organs though, don’t I?” she says. There is no pity in her voice. There is no room for it. It is certain and dismissive.

“Anyway, Suit says there's a meeting. Come on.”

Whoever fills Suit out is awful, but at least the story is progressing now. Clara and Lou have left, lugging the ‘portable’ radio with them, and dan has a new module in his ribs. The mother radio sits in its room, humming and listening in turn. dan follows its lead, listening to tapes then running back to report what information he has learned to the intrepid explorers.

“How are you so calm about all of this?” Clara’s voice filters through the radio accusingly.

“I guess I’m just used to it,” dan lies. Or, not lies – he just doesn’t elaborate.

“Well, we’re across the river,” Clara says. “Off in the distance there’s a fire in the sky, kind of like the northern lights.”

“Alright. I can try and see if there’s anything in the archive that relates to that.”

“Yeah. Can you contact us on your end?”

dan looks around at the mother radio. Tendrils and wax and bone. He doesn’t have the faintest clue of how to operate it.

“I don’t think so. I’ll ask Rat.” dan sighs.

“I’ll ping you in a bit.” Clara hangs up.

On the way to the archives, Rat’s familiar scampering is heard, and dan calls out to him.

“Rat! Hey!” The shape at the end of the hallway freezes, then slowly turns around.

“What are you doing?” asks dan, noting the misgiving look the creature gives him.

“Pacing the hallways and thinking and exploring the outpost.” It doesn’t elaborate.

“Ah. Uh. Cool. So, you never mentioned whether I could contact Clara and Lou on my end, if they’d set their radio up.”

“I don’t think your body is ready yet.”

dan suddenly feels defensive. “What do you mean by that?”

“Your new body. You are not yet comfortable in it and linking yourself to the mother radio in such a delicate capacity requires comfort.”

“I don’t know what that means,” obstinately repeats dan. He refuses to acknowledge the nights when something sings in him as he lays sleepless, ignoring its requests to join. He refuses to acknowledge the objects within him at all.

Rat groans. “Your body was built for so many interesting things, but it will take time to fully grow into it – for everything to fully hatch!” Rat pauses, as if expecting an interruption. When one doesn’t occur, it adds, “And it does not matter. They will call you.”

“Fine,” dan says, and makes to turn away, but Rat continues.

“You are not as open and curious and full of wonder as you initially appeared,” it accuses.

dan turns around. “What?”

“On your podcast. That version of you was a lie and I am very disappointed.”

The outpost exchanges its purple hues for red.

“Well I’m just so sorry to disappoint you! Maybe you shouldn’t have hacked off a third of my flesh if you’re such a fan of my audio content!”

Its face contorts into a pout. “I gave you new flesh and a new boy and you should be grateful! Your old body could not record sounds of play music or receive radio signals!”

It sounds petulant. It sounds hurt, as if dan refuses to see what great gift it has given to him, as if it has caught dan throwing out its hard work.

“Well my old body could eat and sleep and walk without sounding like the fucking Tin Man! And – and – and—"

dan’s heart-tape catches, erases the words that come next. That Dan, on the podcast, was not a lie. That version of me WAS me, could STILL be me, but you ripped me from my world, YOU cut me open and excised that very same wonder, YOU flayed me and remade me into something that does not eat or drink, into something that bleeds, into something that has no time for anything except to walk the same path and listen to the necessary tapes. You made me. It was you who dragged the body out of me until that version of me is as distant as my fast-fading memories or the intestines rotting in your medical waste bin.

Instead of the words that come next, his heart-tape records Rat.

“I thought you wanted to hear stories and hear the hidden music in the world and see the old powerful things that move when we do not look at them,” Rat says. “Dan, you made the world so much more interesting by listening to those tapes. You helped tear a hole between the dreaming world and the waking world. But which is which? Do we dream of leviathans or do leviathans dream of us? Are they a story we tell each other, or are we a story they tell themselves? I have stared into the sun and perhaps I have stared too long and perhaps I am lonely and lost and without guidance.”

Rat’s eyes refocus on his own. “Transformation and sacrifice and apotheosis. Transformation and sacrifice and apotheosis. You should not be afraid. You should stick out your tongue and taste and swallow.”

dan’s mouth is hanging open in awe. He shuts it, asks, “How much do you… what are you?”

Rat giggles in return. “Oh Dan, you’re so cute when you’re confused. You probably have tapes to listen to!” It scurries around the corner. dan gives chase, its words still circling his head.

“Wait! Rat, I’m just trying to understand.”

Rat’s coat disappears through a doorway, and dan yanks open the door.

“I’m just trying to understand…”

The words die on his lips. The room is small and empty. Rat isn’t there.

dan sighs, and walks back to the archives. He doesn’t notice the lack of mechanical noise from his legs.

“This whole ‘other people in the archive’ thing is really getting old,” he says to the ghosts crowding him, and to his surprise they retreat into the air, dissipating like smoke. The space around him opens up like a lung or his chest. dan hesitates, then takes advantage of the extra room to open his heart, just a little, just enough to be able to board it back up quickly in case of fire. He inserts the tape labeled NORTHERN LIGHTS in his chest.

The world the narrator builds is bleak and lovely. It tugs at his heart strings like the cello on the tape, Thomas’ song ringing in the cavernous vault until it is interrupted by the more urgent ringing of the radio.

As dan rushes from the archives, he can’t help but think that Rat was right.

That night, for the first time, dan tries to project outward. There is a vibration in his spine like things shaking off sleep, stretching their long fingers, then he probes outwards through the smog, the earth, the veil to sample, to taste all he can.

“I thought you said this place was safe!” Lou yells, sprinting through whipping branches.

“He said—"

“Don’t trust her—”

“I trusted—”

“Please, how are we going to get—”

dan’s weak awareness collapses and withdraws back into his body, exhausted and trembling. The green woman appears in his consciousness.

“A vision. With sound. Perhaps real. Perhaps not.”

dan looks wildly around him, trying to see past the darkness. “Mark – he told me not to trust—”

The alien voice does not change. “Perhaps real. Perhaps not. Help them in your dreams. Try.”

dan tries again. His dreams are filled with movement and vines and terror. With the last of his strength he tells them to go into the forest, to go and not stop, and then he falls away from them – not into sleep, he was sleeping, so he wakes with Rat standing above him like the very beginning and he doesn’t even have the presence of mind to be afraid of the severing.

Rat is shaking his shoulder. “Dan! Are you injured or in pain or otherwise – oh. Have you been exploring the limits of your new body without telling me? Oh you should not tell me. Then I might have to tell someone and I would prefer this to be a secret between you and me. But whatever you were doing you really should not do any more of it for at least a little while. Look!”

dan raises his head as much as he can. The sight is gruesome. Pink wisps fan out from various cavities, sluggishly retracting into his body, twisting in on themselves. dan groans.

“Fine, I’ll be careful.”

“Oh good, I would hate to lose you and I am no longer cross with you and I should have been more understanding of your particular situation and I apologize.”

Again, dan doesn’t say thank you. dan doesn’t say that its words helped. Instead, he lets Rat scuttle off and, after waiting for his… feelers… to curl into him, he sets off to the archive.

Again he is interrupted by the ringtone and on the other side of the line Clara and Lou are laughing, saying they’ve found a city and people. The talk of the contest is infectious, and when dan says that it will be possible to leave the city with the boon, they all jump at the chance, however big their misgivings.

“You think I could enter the mindscape?” asks dan.

On the other side of the radio, Clara shoves Lou. “Either way, I’m doing this. Dan… see what you can do.”

dan follows her directions. He feels his way through the darkness, following the open road slowly closing in, homing in on her fear and determination, until suddenly the darkness changes consistency, becomes glue, and dan lands in the ring.

Instantly, he is unbalanced. Fear and desperation and confusion pour into his consciousness, flooding his foundations. His months-long calm is broken. He doesn’t remember how to deal with such things anymore. Clara’s emotions build and burn and crack the darkness until the sounds around them start to become affected.

“Wait. Clara – use that anger, about wanting everything to be normal.”

dan’s ears, accustomed to tape weirdness and used to listening for signs of tape damage, catch the static of a tape beginning to break down.

“I think I get it. You see someone’s life, and then you have to will it out of existence, knowing that they were a human being. Can you do that, Clara?”

A gathering like the tide receding leaves dan devoid of emotion once more as Clara prepares herself.

“Yes.”

The memories throw themselves at the pair, one by one. With every suppression/termination/erasure, the edges of them blur, and dan catches soundbites of Clara’s receding memories as their competitor hacks his way to her heart.

“Carrots and the goddamn stick.” “What do you mean, he won’t be able to—” “Listen. Something’s coming.” “Happy birthday dear Clara, happy birthday to you…” “I promise. I promise I’ll get you out of there.”

“Dan, it’s me or him!” yells Clara.

The opponent’s memories come faster. They dissolve into one another, gibbering and unintelligible, as the pair presses on.

It is almost audible when the opponent’s will breaks. A rush of sound envelopes them, a story trying to find a new home, fleeing the desecrated host. dan only catches a small fraction of them.

“Now, I might have a little task for ya, buddy, it’s a special assignment…” “He loved you so much.” “It’s so bad it’s hilarious.” “We can make sure Ben didn’t die in vain, what happened to him…”

Wait, that was Davenport – and Suit—

Clara’s scream cuts through the flood of sound. “Dan, I need more from you!”

dan throws his frustration at being denied a cohesive explanation like a gauntlet into the arena. The sound crescendos then recedes, suddenly transforming into the cheers of the crowd.

“It appears we have a victor,” the Representative of the Curator states. dan holds his breath, tries to curl up in Clara’s shadow.

“But first. To sever a connection.”

The severance is neat, this time. dan tumbles away from Clara like a severed leg tumbles off a bridge – blind and inanimate. It is all too familiar. Falling, falling, falling, splash.

**ring ring ring ring ring ring ring ring-**

“Hey, Dan. How’ve you been?”

Dan keeps his back to the wall and stares out at the passengers going to work. The station is busy with morning commuters, none of which pay any attention to him.

“Good. You?”

“Busy. Shit’s hitting the fan at LMG. Lots of new information coming up.”

Dan hums. “Listen, remember when you said you wanted a return customer? I’ve actually been recording – I think it helps with the… loneliness… can we set up another podcast?”

Mark laughs. “Sure, I mean, if you think it’s a good idea.”

“Great. Thanks, Mark. I’ll come by soon.”

“Dan, I’ve been meaning to ask – how are you, financially? Like, do you have what you need, can—”

“Oh, yeah! Um, funny thing about that,” Dan says. “They’re actually still paying me. I even got a raise for running, apparently. Completely don’t know what that’s about, but I won’t tell them if you won’t.”

Silence on the line. Dan grows concerned.

“Mar—”

“That is weird. And you said your contract ended, right? Then they must have renewed it. Which will be in their records—” Mark’s voice grows excited then disappears. “Okay, thanks Dan. I have some research to do. Stay in touch.”

The line goes dead.

**zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz**

dan wakes like returning from the dead. His head feels waterlogged – too much weight on one side. No balance. The light hurts, searing his eyes, illuminating the absence within his skull. Just soon he had been close to complete, he had hunger and sadness, but no longer. Now all is confusion and sound.

In the sound, some other sounds churn. Sounds… words. Someone above him. Panic begins to build in his chest, the reasoning not yet recalled.

“…black water, break the skin… move the vein aside and plunge the needle into the flesh… ensure the casing…”

A scream bubbles up in him and dan opens his mouth to let it out, it was important to do that, to keep screaming… or moving. dan lurches forward and hits restraints.

“Oh Dan! You should not be awake!” Eyes peer down at him in concern, then narrow. “Oh. You aren’t back yet.”

dan stares in terror at the thing, stares directly into its eyes because he doesn’t want to see anything else. They’re wrong. They’re so wrong.

“Rat.”

The eyes turn into silver crescent moons. “That’s my name! Okay now lie still. You really did a number on your body. You are lucky I came in here to… well I hadn’t seen you in a while. And look what I found! Sometimes I think you purposely damage yourself, Dan, because this is just too much.”

dan drifts in and out of his body, listening to the cadence of the creature’s voice as it talks. As it puts him back together, piece by bloody piece.

dan awakens sometime after his legs are reinserted.

“What…”

“I will scold you another time, Dan. For now I am trying to put all the pieces you tore out of your body back into you.”

“I didn’t…” dan tries to speak past his dry mouth. “I didn’t do anything. I was asleep…”

“Well, you look almost as, hmmm, you look almost as bad as when you were first brought in here. And I told you I can’t excise your new flesh without killing you, so I am at a loss why you thought you could do it. And besides,” Rat shoves a cylinder into his chest and starts to connect the wires, “I thought you were growing into it.”

“How do you think this happened,” dan gasps out.

“Is that a question? It’s one I won’t answer. Now hold tight, this will hurt.”

A gash opens deep inside him. dan of course screams. Rat of course doesn’t react, just keeps a hand on dan’s shoulder to keep him down and his other hands in his chest cavity.

“Can you at least give me…” dan trails off. There’s no painkiller on earth that can save him from the pain of being stitched back together. Plus, he’s sure he has to be present to, well, be present. Instead, he asks, “Did you learn… all of this… yourself?”

Rat keeps working and humming to himself a minute, a song dan knows well but can’t place – that part of him is still on the instrument table, probably – until something clicks in dan and it becomes easier to be.

Leaning back from him, Rat pulls a light down and refocuses it on his insides. “No one learns anything by themselves, Daniel. I was taught a word, and stole from someone else to make it a sentence, and paid for another, and bargained… and by the time I had a paragraph I knew the shape of the next one.” Rat exchanges a scalpel for a needle and thread. “Circles. Knowledge circles us like the planets circle the sun, and all we need is the right gravitational pull to bring ideas and concepts and stories together.” It cuts the thread dan hadn’t felt stitching him together.

“Now, move around a bit and tell me how that feels.”

dan stretches experimentally. Either he is getting used to surgery or Rat is getting better or his tolerance has reached new highs, because the objects shift with him and the pain is bearable.

“Not too bad, actually,” dan says.

“Oh good. See – circles,” replies Rat, winking at him. “Now I have to reattach your arm. Hold still.”

“Yeah, yeaAAAAAAAAH!” dan screams at the sudden surge of power as his left arm is forced back into its socket. He collapses back onto the bed, breathing hard, trying to avoid the feeling of being whole again.

“Aaaand that about does it!” says Rat. “I would pop a confetti cannon but I’m all out.”

“Shame,” dan grits out.

“Yes, I thought so too, but they rejected my application for more of them.” Rat pouts beside him for a while.

“Rat – uh, _hypothetically_ , if I figured out I can use my body to broadcast signals, and it stopped working, what could be the cause of that?” asks dan when strength returns to him.

Rat stares at him a moment, then breaks into a grin. “Oh! I get it! Okay, _hypothetically_ , there could be a number of reasons for that, like…” It starts listing them off on its fingers. Unfortunately, Rat has a large number of them, so dan has to interrupt when it starts listing reasons such as ‘the collapse of an ancient civilization triggered cosmic waves that are only now reaching us’.

“Can we narrow down the list a little? Like, maybe it’s a hardware problem?”

“No, I checked all the pieces I put back in you. It might be… hmmm… what were you doing when the failure happened? Hypothetically!” it adds hurriedly.

“I was in that mindscape – the contest – and my connection was cut off by the… Representative of the Curator, I think.”

Rat glares pointedly at him until dan says, “Hypothetically.”

“And you can’t reach out anymore?”

“I haven’t tried yet.” At Rat’s insistence, dan closes his eyes and tries to expand into the world again.

It works. It works easily. But when dan attempts to retrace his steps to get back to Clara and Lou, he is met with resistance: the more he tries to get through the harder it gets, until he is stopped in his tracks altogether. It is impossible to move, he is blind and lone and suffocated—

dan gathers his will and steps backwards. And again. And again. Until the pressure is manageable and he escapes back to his body in the outpost.

When he comes to, he is blind in the opposite direction. It’s all white.

“Ah – Rat!” dan slaps away the flashlight that is blinding his eyes.

“You were able to reach out. Did you find what you were looking for?” Rat asks, putting the flashlight down.

“No. It’s like there is… resistance.” dan frowns at the ceiling.

“It is possible that there is interference. Or perhaps an insulator or cocoon, impenetrable to radio. Or perhaps what you are looking for no longer exists—”

“No,” dan cuts him off. “There has to be another way. Rat, can you… boost my signal? Like you did with the radio… transistor? Not that that’s an actual thing that you can build,” grumbles dan.

Rat brightens. “Oh yes, we can try that. Can you stand?”

“I’ll hop on one foot if it means I get to contact Clara and Lou,” dan grits out, wobbling on unsteady connections. “Let’s go.”

The hallways of the outpost seem somehow more dilapidated and abandoned than before. More sand streams down from the ceiling, and at certain angles light can be seen through the walls.

“Do wounds heal faster, in the outpost?” dan asks, hobbling along.

“Not especially and not that I’ve noticed, but maybe something here wants you to be healthy. You do perform valuable tasks for the outpost and the company that claims it,” replies Rat in between its mumbled equations.

“I have several ideas that we can try,” Rat says once they are beside the mother radio. “Sit. You might collapse and I don’t want you damaged.”

Hours pass. Rat ceaselessly plugs wires into dan, breaking away at intervals to fetch supplies and tools from around the outpost. Its mumbling merges with the organic groans of the radio, the ambient noise of the outpost, and dan’s own small noises of pain, forming a piece of accidental or purposeful music, like an orchestra tuning itself before the start of a symphony. dan is connected to the radio like the radio is to him, the wires Rat is tuning are the strings of a harp, and if dan just opens his mouth and tastes the air, he can tune to the right note…

“Stop!” he screams, shuddering away from the creature’s cold hands.

It lets him go. “Oh, that was a bit too close to certain delicate areas and I apologize.”

dan shakes the song from his head and gets up. “There’s still no way to reach them?”

Rat bows his head to the being of wire and sound, chained in intimate connection to his throne. “I apologize. I have tried and it is difficult and I have failed.”

“Great. So they’re just stuck out there with the Curator or the Representative of…”

“Yes. Whatever being or thing or force was able to disconnect your radio is able to prevent you from contacting Clara and Lou.” When dan says nothing, it continues.

“But it is a very good thing that we have spent so much time exploring your new flesh! You are so much more… comfortable in it. You are not feeling sore or pained anymore, are you?”

With surprise, dan finds that, indeed, the pain of the operation only hours ago has gone.

“Rat… When you put this inside me, what did you intend? What can this – can I – do?”

Rat stares at him. “Daniel Powell, how could I possibly know that?”

“But—” begins dan, but Rat is already shaking its head.

“The work I do and the things I create… it is not an exact science. I knew you had to play tapes and transform sound, but other than that… I plant a seed and it grows and there are other seeds and they grow and I am not sure what it will become. It is why I am so interested when you explore your new flesh.”

dan’s flesh crawls. No preset story. For better or worse – this has all been him.

Well, if it’s his choice, then…

“Daniel, do you want to leave?”

“I…”

No knife at his throat. No wrong answer. No right one either. The ‘yes’ he says sounds more like a question, but at least it made it past his throat.

“I don’t know if I can get everything back to normal, but I don’t want to stay in this outpost forever.”

“Yes. The outpost is relatively small and stifling and I have already explored most of it.” At dan’s confused look, Rat brightens. “Oh, you have not really traveled through it, have you? Then I have something to show you! Come, come!”

It shuffles out of the room and leads the way down the hallway.

“Now where was it…” Rat thinks aloud as they walk past the many doors. “Not this one… it was… here!”

Rat holds the door open for dan, and follows him into the darkness. dan, for his part, steps in unflinchingly.

The darkness doesn’t stay darkness. Small explosions of colour appear and dissipate near the low ceiling, and a light melody follows their lead.

“What is this place?” dan asks in hushed tones.

“You see the wisps near the ceiling? Reach out your hand.” Rat’s voice emanates from the darkness behind him.

As dan lifts his hand, wisps form around his fingers, bathing him in otherworldly colours. The melody increases and shifts with his hand. Just like a theremin.

“Daniel. Maybe you should try with your other hand.”

“My—”

“Your new flesh, yes.”

Haltingly, he raises the clunky metal appendage to the ceiling. It is instantly aglow with wisps, threading between the wires and tubes like small cats affectionately butting their heads against his hand. The melody swells until its voice fills the small room, becoming more musical, more beautiful. His metal arm: exquisite art.

He feels Rat come to stand at his side. dan finds he cannot look at him at all, even though his new flesh has illuminated both bodies.

“It’s—” dan begins, and Rat finishes, “beautiful.”

dan does not turn. For a recorder, isn’t hearing better than seeing the reason and end?

dan takes down his hand, plunging them back into darkness. Rat’s voice takes the place of the melody.

“The city, this place, it’s not evil. It is not only a place where nightmares are created. There are nightmares, yes, but also beauty and wonder and transcendence and all that makes being a human worthwhile. I am not less human because I have learned about this place, and explored the intersections of this place and our world. I am more human.”

dan’s skin is filled with wisps, fluttering against his organs.

“You started off…” he says to the darkness, and cannot – will not – finish the sentence. As human. As me.

Rat answers anyway.

“Yes. I learned that the world was shallow and then I escaped something and then I started researching and becoming knowledgeable and then the company wanted to hire me and fund my explorations and so I said yes.”

In the darkness, dan both fears and anticipates the answer to his question.

“What was your name?”

Silence. Not a rejection. Not a union. A mercy, perhaps.

“I don’t think I can even remember that.”

dan lets out his breath. “If I left this place… would you come with me?”

A smaller silence in magnitude. It is not waiting, which implies uncertainty. It is merely the breath between sentences.

“Yes, Daniel Powell. If you leave this outpost, I will come with you.”

The tension is broken by Rat’s giggle. “I have already explored all of its rooms, and none are as interesting as this one. Oh, if you do want to escape this place, you should probably listen to some tapes—” Rat lowers his voice to a whisper “—about the company. They might not know how to leave the city, but they do know how to follow Daniel Powell who is a beautiful creation and an egg that will soon hatch and a good friend.”

dan’s heart sinks at the words. Maybe he wasn’t as good as hiding as he had thought. Before leaving the room, though, he finally says the thank you that has been beneath his tongue since the first week.

“Goodbye, Dan.”

Back in the archives, he finds several tapes under the labels ‘Employees, Current’ and ‘Employees, Other World’. It isn’t painful to insert the tape into his body. It clicks into place like a piece of the puzzle. He hits play and sits down to listen.

**click**

Dan crouches near the subway tunnel entrance, holding his logbook and his recorder. It is too early in the morning for other passengers, so Dan isn’t shy about getting the best acoustics he can. The station clock ticks closer to four.

Mark set up a podcast for him and he even has some regular listeners. He feels a little less alone and cast aside. But that is largely incidental. This little silence, this anticipation of the great beast of metal to roar by, is what Dan loves, lives for. He likes trains because they’re powerful, yet predictable. As it blows past him, faster than he can run, carrying hundreds of passengers, Dan can look into the windows and not be afraid of anyone looking back. He can look at the many stories that don’t want anything to do with him.

Dan clicks on the recorder.

“Its about four o’clock in the morning here at the Kingston avenue U stop, and we’re waiting for the 4:07 northbound to pass by. And I think some of my long-time listeners know that the 4:07 is a really special train, because it’s usually the first pass after they rotate out the cars, and since the wheels aren’t as hot, we pick up some interesting articulations in the track action.”

Lights emerge from the darkness in the opposite tunnel entrance. It approaches the platform silently, like some powerful force of nature not made of metal and fire. In moments, the platform is transformed into a whirlwind of squealing metal and rhythmic beats. The air is taken from Dan’s lungs until the train rounds the bend and is gone.

“Now that was a really good pass. You didn’t get a lot of the screeches and rattles that you get with older trains, you can tell that one is newer or better – better-maintained.” His hands shake as he makes a note of it in his logbook.

“The 4:47 is the next one inbound, so we’ve got some time to kill.”

Dan looks around the platform. Still not a soul in sight. He makes himself comfortable for the wait.

“Usually, when this happens, I like to think about the people on the train and who they are, where they’re going, what they think about, what they’re eating – I didn’t really eat much today.” He laughs self-consciously. “I only saw one person on the train today. He was wearing a wide-brimmed hat so I imagine that he works at a hat shop, and has a collection of them at home. He probably felt like taking up space today, that’s why…”

Dan sketches out the man’s story and embellishes it until it’s time for the 4:47. He sets the recorder down. “As most of you know, we have our usual second train tradition for this pass, so I’ll be doing that this time around.”

As the air is sucked out of the platform a second time, Dan readies himself in the classic sprinter’s start position, one foot against the wall. The train suddenly leaps out of the darkness and Dan leaps too, running, racing the train, and he feels like he almost catches it, this time—

He crashes into the wall, bruising his shoulder, and the train keeps on going forward into the darkness of the tunnel mouth, disappearing in seconds. Dan stares after it, catching his breath, before walking back to his recorder.

“That was good. And I saw that this one was retrofitted with some of the refurbished C-821 doors, which I remember reading the press release about a few weeks ago, but hadn’t seen yet in person, so that was a nice surprise.” He takes a swig of water and checks his log. “Well, now it’s time for the third train, which means we’re going down into – into the whole thing, so we can catch the 5:13 from the maintenance area.”

He grabs his bag and jumps off the platform, following the train tracks into the darkness. He turns on the tape recorder again when he is nestled in the crow’s nest maintenance walkway overlooking the tracks.

“And we’re just going to stay nice and perched here. Doesn’t look like I’ll be running into any company this morning, although we’re about to start seeing the cars fill up more, since the first shift of commuters will be hitting soon. Better just double check the log.”

Flipping to the current page he double checks, then triple checks the log.

“Oh. Oh wow,” he says to the recorder. “I completely forgot that the new V-22s are being deployed today! I had marked my calendar for this, and I completely forgot. Wow... what an occasion, I can’t believe this one slipped by me. I just, wow, we’re gonna get a real treat here.”

The anticipation spikes his fingertips. This’ll be something special. He can’t wait to tell Mark about it.

Whenever it is safe to see him next.

Dan remembers his situation and the anticipation turns inwards, driving a railroad spike into his gut. He shakes his head, trying to dispel the thoughts, but all it does is make his eyes smart.

Where is the train? It should be passing by soon. His stupid brain is going to spoil the event. Dan shakes his head some more. Just think of the train, the new V-22s, shiny and unmarked, ready to take on the world…

This makes him want to cry even more for some reason. He talks into the recorder instead.

“And that’s a whopping three minutes late, folks. Wow. I wonder what the hold up is. We usually don’t start getting delays of that margin until rush hour proper. Maybe there were so many commuters eager to get on the new V-22’s that they crowded one of them up!” He laughs.

“I know I would have! I would have jumped right in there... I can just imagine it right now, so many suits and colours being there with all those tired people... and…” Blending in. Going to an office job. Eating lunch at an overpriced café. Coming back with the evening rush and playing some games with his friends. Living a life without looking over his shoulder.

“I’d love to just be there with all those tired people just – just going to work—”

The words snag in his mouth, caught in the dark tunnel of his throat. On the grate of the maintenance tunnel Dan slows, slows, stops, until the earth is spinning and he is not, until it is obvious that he has no control, that he is the train on the tracks, and that he cannot outrun life itself…

Time, measured in dotted yellow lines has passed you by…

“… and I never said an honest thing to you in all my life,” Dan finishes the line soundlessly.

In the terrible stillness, it takes eternity to lower his eyes to his watch. It takes another eternity for the seconds hand to make the sudden jump between one moment and the next.

“Fifteen minutes late,” Dan says, before he is even aware of the roar of the oncoming train.

“Wow.”

It thunders towards him like the pause between stories. Silent. Unavoidable. It bears down on him like an ending.

**click**

dan—

dan is—

shaking. visions of his past or alternate selves—

coalesce. Into one scared man in a maintenance tunnel.

“That didn’t happen – I can’t end up like – I need a break.”

His metal legs are deafening in the lonely outpost hallways as dan walks back to the theremin room, trying to regain some sense of balance. That wasn’t him. Or won’t be him. The anxiety in the man’s voice, in his voice… dan recalls his first day at the outpost uneasily. The absence of fear.

He pushes open the door. Rat is gone, but the song is still there. The lights are still there. dan reaches up with his metal arm and drags his fingers through the air.

“I don’t know if anyone will ever hear this. I’ll probably die if they take this tape out, but... if anyone’s listening... I’m here.” dan lets his arm drop against his side and the wisps disappear.

“I’m here. And I don’t know what that means. I actually feel stupid saying it out loud now. Like saying it would get something off my chest, but instead it just flattened it, or pushed whatever it is deeper into me so I can’t see it as well now. And I’m just drained. And I just… want you to know that. If you’re listening.”

dan ends in darkness. Time flows backwards and dan ends at the big bang. Empty, but with reason. With, if not purpose, reason. His bones grind together and he imagines that he will be reborn. Instead, it is Clara’s frightened voice that is the first ray of light in the universe. It is the beginning of the end.

“Dan, Dan are you there? Please – we are so lost, and the darkness is closing in.”

dan runs through the outpost, Clara’s pleas sticking to him like magnetic tape. He distantly notes that he has no need for the mother radio anymore.

“We’re in the museum – the Representative of the Curator put us in here, after we asked for the boon. He said that we could find it ourselves.”

dan’s body trembles a little. This isn’t how it’s supposed to go.

“I’ll start listening to tapes.”

There’s three of them. Each one narrows the possibilities and the way forward and words he can use, until it closes the path completely, leaving dan standing in the archives.

“Shit! Shit shit shit! I can’t help them! I knew that... but I can’t help them at all!”

The door to the archives opens.

“Dan! Dan Dan Dan!”

Rat moves into the archives, not scuttling but striding, a force suddenly gaining direction. dan wonders what changed.

Suit – Caroline – follows close behind, murder in their usually blank face.

“He asked me to accompany him and would not heed my requests to leave the door closed,” they say to dan in apology.

dan waves it away. “Rat, before… I need to find some way to call Lou and Clara, even though it’s – can you think of anything?”

Rat waits for them to finish their words, then, in a voice colder and more present than dan had heard from him previously, says, “Daniel Powell. Listen. The music.”

The sound of jangling bones replaces the hum of the outpost. dan’s stomach drops.

“The Curator is coming. We should run.”

dan ejects the museum tape and throws it to the floor. As they sprint to the door, dan slows momentarily to grab the tape he had hidden behind one of the shelves. Of course he had checked the spot where Samuel’s tape had been, back on Earth. Of course there had been something in that alcove.

He inserts it into his tape player as he runs.

“Please run faster, it is coming to claim you!” Rat calls from the end of the hallway.

dan uses his default response. “Get me a faster body next time you cut me open!” The tape clicks in. dan speeds up. “And it’s coming for all of us! And where are we running to?”

“Through this door!”

They barricade themselves in a small room of no importance.

“The windows are reinforced,” Caroline monotones.

Indeed, the tinted glass does not budge. dan casts his mind around.

“Rat – this is going to be kind of out there, but you know how uh, I can tune in to different frequencies? Do you think I could emit—”

“Oh! Oh oh oh! Let us try.”

The Curator’s music is the only thing on the radio right now. dan tries to assert his own narrative but the only thing he can do is to make the song louder.

It works. The glass shatters, and shatters again under Caroline’s body as they drop down.

“Caroline, your legs…”

Caroline stands on fragmented bone. On the pavement. The never-ending pavement.

It goes to the horizon, and dan knows, he knows in the heart that keeps looping, he knows the streets go on even further than that.

Caroline follows his gaze impassively. “It is an abomination. Come.” They take his hand. “I do not want to die in it.”

They start running.

“Where should we head to?” pants Rat beside him. “The city is so interesting and wonderful and dangerous and the music will follow us anywhere and they will try to claim you!”

“The radio station. They’re different entities, the Messenger and the Curator, maybe the music will be drowned out by…” dan trails off. “Rat, why are they trying to claim me in particular?”

Rat keeps running beside him, not saying anything.

“Rat?”

“…it was difficult to procure materials…”

Betrayal spills from dan’s mouth. “Rat!”

The creature cringes, doesn’t meet his eyes. dan feels the narrative change underneath his feet. The streets change with it, loop back on themselves. The music picks up. They cannot outrun it. They cannot escape their own individual fates.

When the music overtakes them and smothers their heads in bones and gold, dan loses his own story, and is only vaguely disappointed.

**rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr**

“Dan, I have to leave for a while.”

The words wipe the smile from Dan’s face.

“What do you mean?” he asks, foreboding making itself known in the tension between his shoulder blades.

Mark’s voice is apologetic and distant over the phone.

“There’s something I need to do. I found… a chance, and I have to take it. You…”

Mark trails off. Dan leaps up from the cheap motel bed as if to give chase, casting his gaze around the room for something he can use, something to stop Mark with.

There is nothing. Only the bed and the curtains.

“I found you.”

Dan doesn’t want to know what this means.

“Don’t do this. Mark. Please.”

“Don’t worry. I’ll… I’ll see you later.”

Mark sounds heartbroken. The line goes dead in his hand.

Dan doesn’t want to hang up. He holds the phone in his hand like a mourner refusing to let go of a corpse. It sounded like a goodbye. It sounded horrible.

His eyes move up to the mirror in front of him. He doesn’t want to see. He doesn’t want to look. His eyes keep moving.

Dan looks into the mirror and can see through his head. He’s just a pair of legs.

A pillar – a tripod of flesh, toppling to one side. Two legs, now shaking, and a spindly strip of meat reaching upwards like a desperate seedling reaching for sunlight. The back of his skull like a bud, threatening to unfurl. His arm for… he can’t maintain this metaphor. God. Oh god. The phone clatters to the ground from a hand that does not exist.

How long has he been like this? How long has it been eating away at him?

He knows without question what ‘it’ is. The story. That damned narrative thrust upon him by Davenport. It could’ve been anyone; anyone could have witnessed the story, could have been fuel for its salivating mouth. But it was him.

He opens his mouth to scream, but he does not have one. Nothing happens. Nothing changes. He cannot do a goddamn thing.

Has no one noticed? Has no passer-by looked at him long enough to notice that parts of him are missing, have been missing for a long time?

Mark. Mark noticed. Mark noticed in the way he talked of running, in the way he told of his escape. Mark noticed that he didn’t take up as much space, didn’t leave as big an imprint on his couch as he should have. And now Mark…

Mark has gone after the parts of him that were excised. Dan is sure of that.

He is also certain that Mark will not come back whole, either.

It is predictable, what Dan does next. He has become as unsurprising as the 5 o’clock bus. LMG will surely catch him, but Dan is going after his friend. He is tired of being afraid. He is tired of scrambling away at any slight noise like a rat.

This time, Dan doesn’t take his coat. He doesn’t take his wallet. He isn’t coming back to this motel room. He isn’t coming back at all without his friend.

Dan runs into the dark train tunnel. Still running forward, still afraid, still incapable of deviating from his path.

With any luck, it will lead him to a new life. Or at least a new purpose.

**PURITY PURITY PURITY PURITY PURITY PURITY PURITY PURITY**

The quality of darkness around dan changes ever so slightly. Enter loss. Enter resolve.

“Caroline.”

Their voice moves through the medium to his tape recorder with purpose, contrasting the aimless whispering around them.

“We should attempt to find a way out of this.”

“And find Rat,” dan adds.

Caroline sighs. “We should attempt to find a way out of this. You are being kind to that thing when he has been extremely cruel to the both of us. Come.”

His metal arm is taken by an equally cold hand of flesh.

The darkness refuses to change its quality, no matter which direction they choose. After a bit of walking on broken legs, Caroline asks, “Daniel Powell, why are you so kind to that creature?”

Isn’t it obvious? he wants to reply. He has made me into who I – who we – are. If it is possible to sever the link between the object and the creator, the author and the story – dan shivers.

“I feel like he’s confused. And if I ever become something… something like him, I’d want to be treated kindly.”

Caroline’s voice is as unforgiving as a knife. “We will never become something like him. We were modified by force. He chose to forget who he was.”

dan tries to digest the implications of their words, but they turn to static that he cannot swallow. Becoming something like Rat… by choice?

“How do you know—”

The darkness lightens once more, and speaks of loss and discovery and a path back to the light.

Rat turns blindly towards them.

“Oh, you are here! Or visions of you are? Or one of you is a vision and the other one is real? Or perhaps I am the vision and—”

The darkness swells to accommodate movement and euphoria and devastation.

“Clara! Lou!” dan exclaims in bewilderment.

“Shit, how are you here?” Lou asks.

Finally the darkness has collected enough bodies, and it opens. Into the room – and yes, the space resolves itself into walls and a floor – steps the Representative of the Curator. It welcomes them to the museum in silky tones.

“I believe we haven’t had the chance to be properly introduced. Please, in a circle, why don’t you tell me your names?”

They do so, presenting themselves to be catalogued. dan goes last.

“I’m Daniel Powell. Rat said that you were going to claim something from me.”

“A pleasure to make your acquaintance. And in due time.”

In due time turns out to be a tape, vomited from the Representative. On it, dan hears himself being cracked open and life pouring out – dan hears himself giving birth to a god – dan hears himself lose.

He’s still screaming when he’s transported back to the room of whispers.

“Dan – what happened? Are you alright?” Clara asks, and Rat repeats the question in his own way, hiding behind her.

“I think I kind of… gave birth.” dan feels around his flesh for the source of the child, but if it ever had a corporeal form, the other objects within his body have already claimed the space it had occupied – there is no trace of it now.

The Representative speaks.

“The nature of what transpired is not for you to know. Now, the Curator has decided that it will leave you unharmed if you offer up a token.”

The Representative says suggestions are welcome, but turns down every one they posit. Across from dan, a gathering is happening, like when Clara had finished off her competitor – a gathering of breath, bravery—

“Give me a ship.”

They all stare at Lou.

“Give me a ship, and I’ll explore the furthest corners of this world for you.”

Clara is the first to break the silence. “Lou, you can’t seriously be thinking about doing this? You will never be able to come home!”

Lou flashes a crooked smile at her. “Why would I want to go home? Home’s been explored already.”

dan knows that smile. He remembers it from the bathroom mirror in Archive 81. All he says is, “Are you sure?” and in return, the answer is, “Of course.”

Clara’s desperate protests are interrupted by the arrival of another tape, wetly splattering on the ground.

“I believe we have our answer,” the Representative says, holding out the tape to dan. dan presses play in the middle of Clara and Lou’s argument, interrupting them.

Waves break on the creaky pier, and the chatter of the port town is as alien as the birds crying above them. dan can almost taste the salty air. Lou is saying goodbye.

“The wind’s picking up, Dan. Got to go. I hope you get back home, wherever that is for you.”

The tape ends. dan is standing on a shore, too, but there is no wind or boat. The river is flat and still. He re-inserts the tape from the archives into his chest but does not play it.

“Where should we go?”

“Home. Melody… Melody would know.”

Events fragment themselves. The boatwoman stretches out her hand, and dan places fingers in it. The lapping water. The screaming.

Clara’s mourning.

“Lou’s going to die here.”

Absent-mindedly, dan says, “He could, I don’t know, find something. Rat was telling me that this place isn’t all terrible.”

Reflected waveforms coming back from a mis-matched ending: theremin song.

“The creature lies,” Caroline says. “The creature lied about what it put inside you and it is lying about this.”

Distorted, faint, failing. Caroline’s words drown out the song dan is trying to remember. Rat’s words are a mangled version of themselves.

“The creature is not lying! I never lied to Dan about what I put inside him – I just didn’t mention it. Just because you’re being mean about what I did to you and because you’re starting to remember your dumb little cult that doesn’t mean—”

“Silence,” commands the boatwoman, and the company complies.

dan picks a gear out from between his ribs and tosses it overboard.

Another beach. Another goodbye. Another ruin.

The city near the embankment is crumbling and shaking. Grinding noises of war come from within its walls. And in front of it…

Mr. Davenport?

dan’s supervisor’s mouth opens, but all that comes out is a hollow wind.

“That’s… that’s it?” dan asks the man.

Clara tugs at his arm. “Dan, whatever answer he gives you, you’re not going to be satisfied with it.”

He isn’t even satisfied when an obsidian dagger plunges into his supervisor’s heart.

Another goodbye.

It is starting to matter less and less.

‘Untethered’, the boatwoman called him. It feels significant, this unravelling, this cutting loose. Pre-ordained. Poetic. Fitting to his broken flesh.

Purification.

“Melody?”

Melody’s wife leads them to the door. “You have visitors!”

From beyond the door, a familiar, long-sought voice. “Alright, let them in. Wait – one of them is – the creature can stay outside!”

Her words push even dan back a little. Rat stumbles.

“Mean!” he says, but scampers off after the strange birds whistling through the bushes without further complaint.

The rest of the company enter the well-kept house. Surprisingly suburban again. Melody sits in an armchair, surrounded by power. Bits of gods decorate her bookshelves.

“Sit down. We should talk.”

For the second time, dan’s legs collapse as he obeys the spearhead of the story. The others follow suit.

“So, why are you here?”

“We’re here to see if you could help us find a way home,” dan answers. It’s easy. It’s too easy.

“Okay. Anyone who doesn’t want to be exposed to what I’m about to tell you should leave.”

Clara casts a remorseful glance at dan, and follows Melody’s wife out the door. Melody waits until their footsteps disappear.

“Dan, do you know who your… altered friends are?”

dan hesitates. It has been a while since he has struggled against sentimentality – it is rusty. Curiosity wins out. He shakes his head.

Melody sighs. “Rat was one of Samuel’s underlings.”

She says it casually, like handing him a piece of a jigsaw puzzle after dinner.

“Oh god, he was in the first tape!” Memory returns to him in a burst of static. He knows where the piece fits. It dislodges something when it clicks into place, replacing an iron circle which tumbles to Melody’s floor.

“He’s been trying to learn more about this place ever since. That much exposure to whatever this is can make someone into… something like him.” Something like you.

“And you’re part of the cult – the purity one. Right?” Melody asks Caroline.

Caroline nods. “I was. then I was captured and used in a ritual. My fingers were cut off and replaced, then my soul was scraped out so it could be replaced at will. I am still remembering.”

Questions spill from dan. “What is this cult? And what is this place? And how can you—”

“Okay,” Melody holds up a hand. “Now we’re going to get into the dangerous stuff. It’s best if you let me monologue.”

A whirlpool. Melody gathers will.

“This place… it’s a reflection of our world. Or we’re a reflection of it. It’s a place of will and desire.”

Partway through Melody’s speech, dan blinks. He is Rat in the garden, humming the Visser song over the thyme growing in the sand. His eyes lift to the sun in anticipation.

“As for the cult, the purity guys, they really want to cut off any contact between this place and the ‘real’ world,” Melody finishes.

She stands and crosses the room. The walls bend around her a little.

“Apparently, if you defeat one of these things, you gain a little of its power.” She opens a chest. Inside is a mesh of sound and concrete. “A little piece of Visser. That’s how I’m able to know the things I know.”

She calls for Clara and Alexa. When they enter the room again, Melody says, “Dan, Clara, Caroline, gather ‘round. You’re all going home.”

“What about Rat?”

“What about Rat?” snaps Melody. She sighs. “Fine. He’s in the area. He’s weird enough that he’ll be part of the ritual, whether or not he’s touching it.”

“Could you… tell me why you are offering him this kindness?” Caroline asks.

dan cannot. Will not.

On the count of three, they all grab hold of the artifact.

“Dan, there’s something with your recorder—” Melody tries to say, but they are already so far away from her. She watches them leave, then returns to her tea.

It is like being pulled away from one’s being, like negating the space one occupies. It is not relocation. For dan, it is dislocation.

dan’s unwieldy body catches and snags on the fabric of this reality. He falls away, falls behind the bodies next to him and they zip ahead until he is certain he doesn’t have enough velocity to clear this world and go into the next. This world of will and desire. He doesn’t have enough determination to leave this world, there’s still so much – he will be torn apart in the transfer.

So, between oblivion and his new form, dan –

Good god, dan chooses it.

He wraps his arms around himself, trying to hold his new flesh like an anchor, and plummets.

Gradually, the wind is replaced with another sound. The tape he took from Samuel’s alcove starts up in his chest. It is a taping of a choir. Except, the voices… the voices are familiar…

“Rat? Are you there?” dan reaches out, blind.

“Dan!” says Rat excitedly. “I am home and I am happy! Can’t you see? I am to join the chorus! There’s Samuel and Visser itself and I am to sing. Can’t you see?”

dan cannot see anything. dan says he cannot see anything and Rat doesn’t acknowledge it or him or his body. dan is finally reaching for Rat and Rat is closing the door, severing their connection – Rat is shedding his skin and dan is discarded with it.

“Thank you! So much. I have been trying and working and striving to find some semblance of the transcendence I felt when I was with them but there was nothing. There was nothing that could compare, all the secrets I learned were like ash in my mouth. But now I am with my friends and my god and I am about to sing! I am sorry that I did not tell you of the agreement I made with the Curator, but I am not sorry for making you what you are. Thank you, Daniel Powell.”

Rat casts dan aside like training wheels, like bandages to stop the bleeding until he is healed and whole. Rat leaves dan like a holy man leaving the steps for the church.

All dan can taste is ash. Rat begins to sing. Not mumble or hum – to sing.

“I guess… if that’s what makes you happy,” dan says through the rejection. “As long as you’re happy. As long as you’re happy.”

dan keeps repeating that as Rat retreats from him. He keeps repeating but the conclusion still hits him all the same. The story is this: dan had been foolish enough to believe in Rat. Rat hadn’t believed in Rat. Rat gets to go home. dan is left clutching at absence, at souvenirs. dan is left in the darkness.

**PURITY PURITY PURITY PURITY PURITY PURITY PURITY PURITY**

Wind.

Caroline sits on a rock on the windswept plain, looking at the horizon. Melody’s power was not strong enough to change them into something else, but it brought the two of them closer to the boundary between the monstrous and the acceptable. This is a place of transitions.

Here, the only thing to do is wait.

The landscape is not interrupted by scant boulders, big enough to hide behind if needed. The boulders are as much of the transition as the wind is, providing shelter, respite. dan is lying behind one now, unconscious. The wind does not reach him. It will, eventually, but not yet.

The wind does not reach either of them, even though Caroline has climbed the nearest boulder and is now sitting on the windward face. Nothing about them billows or moves as they look at the horizon.

Clink – another piece of metal or bone disengages with dan’s prone body and rolls away. A delayed transplant rejection, only occurring now that the body recognizes the new flesh as enemy. Only occurring now that dan recognizes the surgeon as enemy.

The speck on the horizon jumps forward, miles within seconds. Caroline hasn’t blinked. Soon the change will be upon them. Soon Caroline will be released from this hell.

The speck jumps forward. And jumps forward again. Caroline climbs down the rock.

“Hello?” calls the glitching mass of people, rounding a boulder. “We are here – is anyone alive in the general vicinity?”

“I am.” Caroline meets fate with squared shoulders. “You are fighting to close the barrier?”

“Yes,” says the crowd. “You are Caroline Lesta?”

“I was,” Caroline says. “I have been here too long.” The shame of coming home after a war with nothing to show for it. Having failed. Caroline gestures behind them with their bandaged stump.

“Daniel Powell is still alive. He might prove useful.”

The crowd goes slack then appears next to dan.

“He is unconscious.” Caroline follows the mass to the shedding body. “He was… modified. You will have to do what is necessary before you take him with you. You have your knife.”

The crowd looks at one another uneasily. “That is a… drastic measure we are not entirely comfortable with. He is… our friend.”

“He will survive,” Caroline cuts it off. It is the only way. “Before that, I would ask you for a favour. I have been here too long. I am an abomination.”

“But…” says the crowd.

“Do not make me beg.” It is the only way.

The crowd looks back at dan, then looks back at Caroline with resolve. “We are grateful for your work. Where would you like us to perform the action?”

“The throat. It will happen soon? The barrier will be closed?”

“Yes. We are close.”

The wind starts to flutter softly against Caroline’s face. They close their eyes.

“Good. Then I will die happy.”

The body falls to the ground. Two empty chalices after the guests have gone, cracked in opposing ways. The crowd kneels in the junk surrounding dan, knees scraping against chess pieces and teeth.

“We are… I am… very sorry.”

Repetition. dan is disassembled by someone who loves him. Is it better to be conscious of one’s own creation? It is the only difference.

**____________________________________________________________________**

The mass of mangled flesh sits across the table from Dan, seemingly propped up solely by force of will. It looks... fresh. It looks like a fresh kill. Muscle and veins hang from its open ribcage, bleeding unsteadily. Occasionally a small object works its way out of its body and sinks into the surrounding void.

Dan looks at the thing across the table. Through the pulp of its caved-in skull, it examines him back. It is hard to know how long he has been sitting across from it. They are, the both of them, suspended in darkness. Not together, but not apart.

Dan examines the thing across him and asks what happened.

At least I helped, the thing responds. At least I learned.

“You helped,” scoffs Dan. “You are the one who got us – me! – into this mess!”

And who refused to get us out? retorts the creature. Who squandered their time on trains and bagels? I know secrets that will shatter your flighty animal skull. What have you done?

Dan opens his mouth, closes it. I ran, he wants to say. I lived. I survived. But he looks across the table to the pieces of him that were taken, that he had lost, and he can’t quite say it.

Instead, he says, “At least I didn’t abandon my friends.”

Its head turns to the side. Dan can see clear through its mouth.

Time does or does not pass. Finally, it says, I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t commit. Not fully. Maybe if I had – if we both had, maybe if we both had gone our separate ways, we could have been whole. Apart.

Another object – a vacuum tube, perhaps – drops from its chest and sinks into the darkness.

Neither man nor machine, not human nor monster. Not complete, but not enough space for another. They both hang in limbo. They’ve been here a while.

“What happened,” asks Dan, softer this time.

The into two had crept silently up behind dan, took one arm and pulled. It wasn’t all LMG – it had been happening for a long time before the transfer. The company knew what it was doing to him. It needed the story to be told. It needed him to be consumed. But dan – and no one could give him an answer – for some reason, dan didn’t collapse or cave in or die underneath the weight of the building. Instead, like some fucked up hydra – cut one head off and two more will take its place – dan shattered.

The world I was transported to, was useful in, the creature explains, is a mirror image of the world you were left in. To open the portal the mirror had to be shattered, and you – I – we shattered with it. I happened to be shattered in just the right way to be useful to the company. You… the thing’s lip curls up at him. You were just broken.

“You aren’t any better off than I am,” flatly says Dan. “You can’t function any better than I can. You listened to tapes? Well I ate and ran and felt the sun on my… I thought about my parents. I saw the beauty in the streets and the intersections. I was afraid, yes, but I was also happy and sad and everything in between. And it was all me. I was me.”

A hail of objects hit the void and disappear. its head swivels, too loose in its socket, to stare after them.

What does this place look like to you? it asks after some time.

Dan lets it go. “I don’t know… there’s a table. Two chairs. Us. And darkness.”

dan makes a gurgling sound, too wet and horrible to understand what it was supposed to signify. Dan looks around uneasily, wondering what it can see through its decimated eye sockets.

How did you get here?

“I walked for a long time along the train tracks.”

It stays silent.

“Where do you think this is?” Dan prompts.

I don’t have my tapes anymore, says dan, but I think… some sort of limbo. Possibly.

“Purgatory?” Dan jokes.

dan winces, and the movement dislodges something purple and glistening, quickly swallowed up by the limbo.

Possibly.

“Well, I guess I have time.” Dan stretches on the hard wooden chair. His legs are tired. It feels good to sit, to rest, to maybe never move again…

Beauty in the streets and intersections… that reminds me of someone, dan says quietly, interrupting Dan’s budding lethargy. Dan sits up again, frowning. This tiredness it unusual.

I miss movement, dan says, and it sounds like a concession, even if Dan doesn’t quite understand what he is conceding to. I’ve been walking the same paths for a long time.

dan leans in, tilting his head. I might even miss canned peaches, he adds jokingly.

“I, uh, started a podcast,” Dan supplies, his turn at the peace offering. “Do you remember the train phase we had a couple years ago? Yeah, it’s back in full force.”

I knew it would come back, groans dan. Although – I was wondering about the V-22s…

Time passes or it doesn’t.

Dan becomes aware that the table is no longer there. Has he travelled deeper into the darkness? Or was the table a figment of his imagination? Is he even conscious?

He takes a step forward to test the space. Wait –

He holds up his hands. Both of them. He has two hands.

Frantically, he searches his body. Seams run up his torso, marking the convergence. There are bumps or hollows where there should be none, but… He is whole.

He snaps his head up, expecting something to change, the darkness to give way to light, but he is as blind as the previous moment. The darkness is unrelenting.

“Shit.”

Dan begins to walk.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hopefully this made some sense and you enjoyed it  
> archive81 is one of those pieces of fiction that i adore even though everyone is objectively terrible. it really is Marc & Dan’s world and I am simply living in it.  
> what is it about trains? WHAT is it about trains. shoutout to all the fb train groups out there. 
> 
> and as always, I’ve been laymanterms tumblr.com. Have a good night everybody.


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